[NBLUG/Announce] State of the LUG

Greetings, As President of the North Bay Linux User's Group, I would like to take an opportunity to send out a State of the LUG update which is something that hasn't happened in a long time (if ever). The goal of this E-Mail is to update all members about our current status in all areas of importance and to encourage further discussion about the future of NBLUG in the Talk list. Here are some TL;DR numerical highlights about the state of NBLUG in 2014: 460 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Announce list 273 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Talk list 436 Talk list E-Mails were sent in 2013 (down from 897 in 2008) ~12 members attend each meeting as of 2014 (down from ~30 in 2008) 6 of 6 board seats are filled now with 1 seat likely opening in July 3,466 hits were registered at http://nblug.org in the last 3 days ~10 people are in the #nblug Freenode IRC channel at any given time $145.73 is in the NBLUG cashbox secured by our treasurer 3 years have passed since a non-member not named Alison presented Important information: Please contact us at speakers(a)nblug.org if you know of someone who would be willing to present on a Linux or open-source related topic (more details below). NBLUG general meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 7:00 in O'Reilly's Tarsier meeting room at 1005 Gravenstein HW N. in Sebastopol, CA. O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com) additionally sponsors NBLUG by providing two raffle books at each meeting for attendees as well as a free book of of a speaker's choice if they request one. Sonic.net (http://sonic.net) sponsors NBLUG by hosting our racked http://nblug.org server in their Santa Rosa datacenter. On behalf of the board, I would like to publicly thank our sponsors for their continued support which enables us to operate without ongoing membership dues or donation drives. Mailing lists: Our mailing lists have remained fairly static for the last year, with around 460 people subscribed to the Announce list (at http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce) and around 273 people subscribed to the Talk list (at http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk). Since the Talk list was established on 1999-06-08 there have been a total of 14,370 E-Mails sent. The busiest year was 2003, when 3,511 E-Mails were sent. The slowest full year was 2011, when only 165 E-Mails were sent. A total of 436 E-Mails were sent last year. I've provided full statistics at the end of this E-Mail for those who are interested. General meetings: Attendance at the monthly general meetings has declined significantly since 2008. As an example from the logbook, on 2008-04-08 a total of 24 people signed in while on 2013-04-09 only 10 people signed in. While we encourage everyone to show up early and write their names in the logbook to be eligible for the monthly book raffles it is not uncommon for a fair number of people to bypass signing in (which is potentially influenced by the security-minded nature of our membership, to whom I would encourage signing in with an X instead). At the 2014-02-11 meeting only 8 people signed the logbook but I remember counting 13 people in the room. Based on some quick looking at the logbook and adjusting for people not signing in I estimate that attendance in 2008 likely averaged about 30 people while 2013 attendance likely averaged around 12 people per meeting. Anecdotally, it's been several months since we've had to move the tables and set up the chairs in rows. NBLUG Board: The current board as elected during the November 2013 general meeting consists of Allan Cecil (President), E. Frank Ball III (Vice-President), Michael Tucker (Scribe), Matt Da Silva (Treasurer), Tom Most (Board Member at Large), and Morio Sakaguchi (Board Member at Large). Our next scheduled elections will be during the November 2014 meetings. However, Michael Tucker indicated at the time he was elected that he would be moving away from the area around July. Per Section 3 of our bylaws (http://nblug.org/bylaws), at that time the board may choose to elect a person to fill in as an Acting Scribe until the next election. Any such action will be announced at that time. NBLUG website: The official NBLUG website at http://nblug.org has seen a continual flow of traffic, with 3,466 hits registered on the homepage in the last three days alone. However, a significant portion of this traffic appears to be bots based on other uninteresting linked pages with high hits, so the statistics are likely very skewed. At this time, the only content that is reliably accessible on nblug.org is the last few years of events and a few static pages such as our bylaws. We know that a Drupal update at some point caused a large number of pages to become unlinked and generally difficult to find, including past meeting minutes notes. The NBLUG board is discussing ways to improve the state of the website and server and at this time Tom Most is leading the investigation into how to proceed. The first priority is to ensure the information presented is up-to-date on all pages (at this time, http://nblug.org/membership/ in particular is extremely inaccurate). Other priorities include forwarding the old NBLUG mirror folder at http://mirror.nblug.org/ to point to Sonic's mirrors at http://mirrors.sonic.net/. IRC channel: NBLUG has an IRC channel at #nblug on the Freenode network (chat.freenode.net). My own logs seem to indicate that chat volume dipped to its lowest levels early last year when conversations happened less than once a week, but activity has increased substantially in the last few months. As of 2014 there are usually 10 nicks logged in to the channel at any given time, and there has been active conversation most days in the past few weeks. It should be noted that these statistics are somewhat anecdotal in the absence of reliable logs; at one point a webpage of statistics existed but I have been unable to locate it. Cash balance: The NBLUG cashbox contains exactly $145.73 as of 2014-02-25 when the balance was confirmed by our Treasurer and holder of the cashbox, Matt Da Silva. The last expenditure I am aware of from the NBLUG general fund was a hard drive for the NBLUG server in 2004 (with pledges for that effort tracked anonymously at http://nblug.org/hddpledge). Because O'Reilly generously sponsors NBLUG by providing us with a room to meet in and Sonic.net provides hosting for our website our expenditures are extremely low. There are currently no expenditures the board can foresee in the near future and thus we are not currently seeking donations. Speakers: The last time a talk was given by a non-member of NBLUG was on 2013-07-09 by Alison Chaiken, who was also the previous non-member speaker on 2011-09-13. The last talk given by a non-member not named Alison was 2011-03-08 by Same Bowne, or effectively three years ago. (As noted, if you have any leads about a potential speaker please let us know at speakers(a)nblug.org and we will promptly follow up with them.) Opinion and analysis: I, Allan, feel that the evidence above points to a potentially dwindling, but by no means dead, user group compared to the level of activity 5 years ago. Some of the statistics provided above can be explained as following the natural rhythm of Linux adoption; in 2003 when Talk volume was at its highest the number of E-Mails related to troubleshooting was much higher. As the difficulty of getting a functional Linux system going has decreased the amount of discussion has also decreased. The ease of installing Linux improved to the point that the last InstallFest held by NBLUG was in 2007 (although we've had several "Hackfest" meetings since then, usually to fill in months when we did not have a speaker). In recent years, I feel that the general decrease in attendance has likely been directly tied to the lack of fresh speakers. To that end, one of my primary goals this year is to work with the board to seek out speakers who can present on topics that would interest you, the members of NBLUG. While the board actively pursues this goal independently, I feel the best resource we have to connect with potential speakers is likely our members themselves. I encourage everyone to share their thoughts about this State of the LUG update on the talk list and I look forward to a lively discussion. Thanks, Allan Cecil President, North Bay Linux User's Group A.C. ****** - Raw talk posts per year in ,CSV format as extracted from the archives at http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/: Year, Posts 1999, 133 2000, 395 2001, 940 2002, 1,564 2003, 3,511 2004, 1,859 2005, 1,247 2006, 1,403 2007, 810 2008, 897 2009, 444 2010, 315 2011, 165 2012, 239 2013, 436