Group purpose

[Karsten M. Self]

Picking up a thread from this month's meeting, namely what the goals of
NBLUG should be.

For starters, a friend of mine has a well considered page on what a
linux group should shoot for.  Most of these are attainable and
(largely) achieved by NBLUG.

    Recipe for a Successful GNU/Linux User Group
    by Rick Moen
    http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/essays/newlug.html

Critical components being a website, and regular meeting times and
places.


There are a number of other worthwhile documents (several referenced in
Rick's essay), among them:

    GNU/Linux User Group HOWTO
    Kendall Grant Clark
    http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO.html

The User Group Howto (UGH) suggests four primary goals:

    * advocacy
    * education
    * support
    * socializing

Without getting too structured (or anal) about the process, there's an
old management school meme for developing action plans:  goals,
strategies, & tactics, or GST.

The four items above would be the group's goals (some truely scary
people cap this off with a vision statement -- not necessarially a bad
thing, but often abstracted and/or glossed entirely out of relevance).

Strategies are general methods to be used in reaching a goal -- a
middleware space between goals (abstract) and tactics (specific
deployments).  From dict on my system:

    3. a plan of action encompassing the methods to be adopted from
       beginning to end of a task or endeavor, focussing on the general
       methods; -- contrasted with tactics, which is a plan for
       accomplishing subgoals of lesser extent than the primary goal.
       Thus, a strategy is a plan for winning a war, and a tactic is a
       plan for winning a battle.


I think the four goals stated above are probably reasonably complete,
though if anyone want to suggest others, I'd be happy to see them.

On the strategic level, you'd look at what assets and activities NBLUG
has and where things are and/or aren't working. 

We do have a website (and behind it:  hosting facilities and either a
box or virtual host to put it on).  Also a mailing list.  Regular
meeting time and place are also good, as is a core of at least 25 people
who will show up for a meeting (some for the first time) regardless of
whether or not an agenda is set.  Plus a larger group (number I recall
is 150 or so) subscribed to the maling list.  

That's a pretty good start.

Now for the question I was dying to ask for about half of Tuesday's
meeting:  What are others looking for.  And more importantly, what are
you willing to do to help make it happen?

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
   Scandinavian Designs:  Cool furniture, affordable prices, great service.
     San Rafael, CA.
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