Dear Josh
Any attempt to eliminate my boorish presence from your excellent
convocation of Wednesday last is hereby revealed to be obfuscation....
Josh, you are obviously in denial - I admit I do look a bit like a pink
elephant, especially in that loud shirt and mis-matched tie. But you
could have at least mentioned my wife obsessively working the City Paper
crossword puzzle, while eating expensive meatloaf and cracking wise
whenever I opened my mouth, which was too damn much.
On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Josh Sled wrote:
Let me recap the meeting last night, at least as much of it as I
remember. :)
First let me complement you on the meeting venue.
Oktoberfest at a beer hall, reminded me of ze old days, marching with
Adolph from the Brgerbrukeller, holding Ludendorff at gunpoint, the fall
colors we enjoyed as we march to Berlin...
...ah but zhat was a different time...
:^)
There was rough agreement that the active VAGUE membership would welcome
more, broader, regular content ??? so long as it is in the orbit and
service of VAGUE's core interests: free, open and open-source
technologies and policies.
Excellent point.
There was widespread agreement that re-branding VAGUE is a non-starter.
People love the VAGUE identity. Hell, *I* love the VAGUE identity; my
raising of "re-branding" was always more practical than to kill
"VAGUE".
But, as we discussed at the meeting, killing VAGUE would largely
eliminate the twin scourges of ADD and ADHD from Central Vermont.
Unfortunately this activity would likely require the mortal participation
of the membership, so I recall we voted it off the table, in favor of more
beer, recollection at this point, is not as easy as I would have hoped...
As such, I just purchased the domain name "vaguevt.org", which will
become the new web home of VAGUE. After it is roughed in, we'll
undertake a coordinated "SEO 101" campaign to get some google juice for
a TBD set of terms and phrases related to vermont, unix, open-source,
&c. The goal is to make VAGUE readily findable for people coming to or
in the vermont area and want to be involved with free/open/web
technologies. In support of that goal, we not only need a nice landing
page, but also some form of regularly-updated content (over and above
meeting notices/summaries/&c.), ie. a blog, twitter updates, &c.
Thanks for putting the good foot forward.
(A very welcome contribution would be a design and visual identity for
VAGUE and the site. A logo, a color scheme, &c ??? while there's
certainly a sort of hacker aesthetic to the default media wiki style or
unadorned html, there's nothing quite like a unique, simple, consistent
visual design.)
Gee, I love that kind of talk... Yea, art and style... eh, I know what I
like.
Jonathan and Basil from CCV/FIREHOSE were present. FIREHOSE draws
presentations from the technology-focused subset of the CCV student
body, in interest-group style, on a weekly basis. There is a very high
degree of overlap between FIREHOSE' and VAGUE's interests, and I imagine
we'll have coordinated meetings regularly, moving forward. In fact, if
I heard correctly, the October meeting will be about Blender (and its UI
overhaul), hosted at CCV. Details forthcoming. :)
You cut me to my heart Josh. You damn the BOSI Adult Swim with VAGUE
mention and faint praise.
That said, I would opine that For Improving & Recognizing Emergent Human
Open Source Endeavors (FIREHOSE), represents new geek blood, and should
take the lead in VAGUE activities, while VAGUE does what it does best,
pander to old gas bags such as myself. The reason I say this is that
after the aforementioned beerhall putsch, I staggerd over to their Open
Source/Free Software FIREHOSE meeting at Champlain, and demanded that the
35 - 50 people their to register for VAGUE. This sizeable gathering of
very clevar intelligent and sensable young people proceeded to ignored me,
thats how smart they are. As I looked out from the back of the room, into
the video projectors glow and saw these fresh, distressingly innocent
young, earnest faces, something welled up in my chest, I asked Jonathan if
I could step outside... it turned out to be the beer. The wife cleaned me
up and we went back to Barre....
...anyway that is what I remember. Antony was there maybe he has
something different to report.
Between that October meeting and Rubin's offer to host and present a
November meeting, we have some momentum and headway to plan a
forward-looking calendar of content.
Jonathan and I may try to cook something up for the waning days of
October.
One way to do this is to look to existing companies/organizations that
do user-group outreach. Also, coordinating with regional users groups
and staying on top of conference schedules will be important in trying
to identify and engage presenters as they travel near and through our
region. This is a very parallelizable task, so I hope some of you can
step up to track your own areas of interest. This is exactly the place
where an expanded range of content can help fill the meeting schedule,
and bring in a wider range of attendees, and help grow the group.
This is clearly the way to go, which is why I see FIREHOSE and BOSI Adult
Swim as feeders to our list (and aparently brew) based group.
I can see a future where VAGUE is a vibrant hub for Vermonters
interested in the wide range of free and open technologies. I'm
encouraged by our recent activity. And I hope those reading this far
can commit a fraction of their time to helping make that future a
reality.
Anyway after the Wednesday night "organizational meeting", maybe we should
we give up on that joint meeting with AA...
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
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Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://www.flint.com/home
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
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