[SLL] interesting article on LUGs

[Ken Meyer]

Bill --

Agreed totally that groups have difficulty keeping critical mass in
organizers, and most have been, and are being, run by a couple of folks who
are very difficult to replace when they move on to other things, are young
and have families, have career changes, whatever...

Randy Bentson, Wes Cole, Tim Maher, Brian Hatch, Paul and Kimberly Edwards
(FWayLUG activities), Jeremy Reed, Scott McDermott (SAGE/SASAG), Meryll
Larkin (LinuxChix), Jason Raymond (SeaJUG), Louie Swalby and the SeaSLUG
Board have been some among those who took-on pivotal responsibilities for
very extended periods and whose retreat from the scene has eventually been
at least temporarily catastrophic for their groups.  Chuck Wolber still
orchestrates TacLUG, though his Board has evaporated and, for some reason,
the member group has eroded out from under him.  James Affeld is still the
SNUG man.  KPLUG has a couple like Brian and Rikke who seem to share major
responsibilities.

I know that many other people have made critically important contributions,
and I do not intend to slight your efforts, people; but I have cited some
major "go-to" people who have been identified with their groups in the past,
and accepted as speaking for the group, who made sure that meetings
happened, sent out the notices, M/C'd the meetings, etc.

Also agreed that there is a surprising amount of effort involved in just
finding speakers and sending out the notices, which most attendees probably
don't really appreciate unless they've done it.  When I asked for help at
one GSLUG meeting, the first comment was, "Why don't you update the
website?"

However, I disagree on the availability of speakers, the lack of ongoing
need for hand-holding of new users and the general relevance of dBug to OSS.

GSLUG had two presentations each month and, as a rule, we weren't in a panic
over getting speakers.  As I noted in my recent organizational meeting
notice, we were fortunate to attract even internationally recognized
speakers on occasion, when they were in the area and we had participants
with good contacts.  Sometimes members spoke, and we recruited some from
other local groups.  There is also a large commercial community in the area
to draw from.  Check out the line-up at LinuxFest.  Yes, not infinite
possibilities, but

The biggest problem I saw was to balance the level of the talks so that
neither guru nor newbie would feel abandoned and give up on the
organization.  Enticing old pros such as yourself is probably the most
difficult, since the type of information available in an hour presentation,
whatever the target level, is probably "old hat" to you.

Since GSLUG met at NSCC, I always tried to have one talk that would be
pretty completely comprehensible for the student who had a basic
understanding of computers and the ubiquitous functions of operating
systems, networking, etc.

As I also said, the movers in the attempt to resuscitate GSLUG just got a
dozen folks to come out for a Ubuntu install and usage primer without much
publicity.  Even if you can sit down with a DVD and a book and figure it
out, lots of people would not get over the initial threshold without a
kick-start from the community and the assurance that there was continuing
help at hand.  And not all of the problems solved at the GSLUG meetings were
trivial newbie ones; lots of driver problems were also solved by
collaboration between experts.

As for dBug, you have indeed added a dimension to their comprehension of
their operating system and the alternatives available to them, but most
folks there are, in my experience, very application-centric, such as the
very active Final Cut Pro Users Group.  But boy, are they organized and
consistent!  The envy of all user groups in that respect, I think.

Ken Meyer


-----Original Message-----

From: linux-list-bounces at ssc.com [mailto:linux-list-bounces at ssc.com]On
Behalf Of Bill Campbell
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 10:50 AM
To: linux-list at ssc.com
Subject: Re: [SLL] interesting article on LUGs


On Thu, Jul 19, 2007, Zach Carter wrote:
>This brings up a question for me.  Is there a good LUG
>that meets regularly around Seattle?  The last time I
>researched it, I didn't find anything that was meeting
>regularly in town..
>
>http://www.linux.com/feature/118046

I don't know of any Linux groups that meet regularly in the Seattle area.

One major factor in the decline of user groups is the ready availability of
on-line resources where people can get answers to questions, discuss
issues, etc.  Linux has progressed to the point where the need for help
installing systems has dropped markedly.

The only *nix group that I know of that's having an active program of
meetings is the Seattle Mac Users Group, http://www.dbug.org which meets in
North Seattle.  They have quite an active schedule of SIG meetings at their
resource center, open sessions every Saturday morning there where people
can bring machines and talk to others and get questions answered, and
frequently have tutorials on Saturday afternoons.  I've done several
tutorials on Unix for OSX, and am probably going to be doing some on
specific CLI and open source applications.

Having been on the board of directors of the Seattle Unix Group,
http://www.seaslug.org, since it was founded in 1984, I've seen the biggest
problem is getting interesting presenters, and members who are willing to
do what's necessary to keep things going.  It requires a fair amount of
effort to arrange speakers and come up with things to keep people coming to
meetings.  It always seems that the workload falls on a very few people,
who may not be able to continue their efforts.

Bill
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