[Gslug-general] thoughts..

[Ken Meyer]

In my view, your recommendations are excellent and would appeal to a lot of
people.

Question three is easy to respond to.  Traditionally, the totality of the
straight donations and raffle ticket sales go to paying the $50 per meeting
that GSLUG has to pay to NSCC for use of the room.  There is seldom any
excess, and if so, it goes to cover lean times.  This payment to North is
very galling to me, even though it is much less than an outside organization
would be forced to pay.   That's given the effort that we have expended to
reach out to students in the Linux Program at North, which was the strongest
around (IMHO), but is now "in flux" because the main instructor retired this
past summer.

However, the NSCC location, access, and facilities are, in total, better
than any other venue that I have had contact with -- and I have looked
around a lot.  North's administration, about which I know more than I would
like to via close personal associations and the time I have spent in classes
there, pursues a consistently pound-foolish approach across the board, so it
would take thermonuclear force to get them off it.

If GSLUG ever got just a little ahead (and keeping some reserve is necessary
against the possibility of some poor attendance meetings), we could buy
sandwich boards to direct people to the meeting, create banners and stuff to
advertise GSLUG at various fairs and fests, set-up demo computers, get a
multiple burner for distro CDs... and on and on.

A couple of groups I have attended, including TacLUG and the Audio Engineers
Society, have had introductions at the beginning of meetings.  Eric just
declared them to be boring, but I think that is only if the attendees'
descriptions of themselves are not very interesting -- not because the
individuals are not interesting, but because they don't present it very
well.  I frequently make notes to collar someone during the break when I
learn of his or her background and interests.  The real problem is that it
does take time, so it has to go pretty fast.

What is even more important, in my view, is to develop a group database, so
we know who is at the meetings, what their expertise and interests are, so
we can build on the community and not rely exclusively on one or at best a
few organizers.  This function cries out for a "Social Director" who will
insure that everyone has a name tag, has signed in, fills out a
questionnaire, is introduced as a first-time attendee, checks to make sure
the new folks are comfortable and are getting something out of the
meeting....

I endorse the use of lightning talks to address a single command line
utility or shell syntax: a Command of the Day, so to speak.

Ken M.


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

From: gslug-general-bounces at gslug.org
[mailto:gslug-general-bounces at gslug.org]
On Behalf Of Hitoshi Satow
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 4:15 PM
To: gslug-general at gslug.org

Subject: [Gslug-general] thoughts..

I attended my first meeting last month.  So I'm new, but here is my two
cents anywho..

1.  Can we have a few minutes when the meeting starts for some informal
introductions.  At least meet the new guys?
2.  Give the sponsors a min to tell who they are, what they are doing for
gslug

3.  State where donations go and what you get for donating (raffle ticket or
not?)

I enjoyed the lightning talks about new software (i.e. tsocks and
vimperator.)  I use vimperator all the time now.  For me it's key to see how
other people approach and solve problems.

When I talk about Linux to my friends who use other operating systems, the
FIRST thing I tell/show them is the CLI and how powerful it is.  Maybe
lightning talks on individual commands in the CLI would be useful.  Even
commands like ls, which I use all the time, have useful switches on them
that I haven't used.

I'm looking forward to the talk on GNU screen.

-Toshi


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