Group purpose

Eric Eisenhart eric at eisenhart.com
Mon May 20 11:33:21 PDT 2002


On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 01:23:04AM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> 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.

*muttermutter*Rick*mutter*mutter*http://linuxmafia.com/bale/#nblug*grumble*

Yeah, we probably do do most of those things.  I haven't checked recently
that we're listed on *all* of those different LUG listings, but we're on
several of them.

> The User Group Howto (UGH) suggests four primary goals:
> 
>     * advocacy
>     * education
>     * support
>     * socializing

The goals is something Dustin and I have talked a lot about at some point,
and that the board's been involved in discussion of, but most members
haven't specifically heard.

Commentary on each:
1) advocacy) I almost view this as a secondary goal; it's not something we
   actively try and do; we figure if you learn about Linux and get some help
   getting there you'll realize that Linux is just so great that you want to
   be using it.  In other words, we just kind of let advocacy happen.
2) education) speakers on topics, answering questions on the mailing list,
   etc.  Definitely a primary goal.  We've generally aimed at splitting this
   into two groups to educate; beginners and intermediate/advanced users.
   We try to aim more for the more beginning/newbie users but also try to
   have the occassional topic of interest to advanced users.  (never two
   advanced topics in a row, though; don't want to scare newbies away)
3) support) InstallFests, answering questions on the mailing list and
   answering questions at meetings.  I think we do pretty well here, though
   we might be able to do better at answering questions at meetings (maybe a
   5 minute "ask any *nix/free software question" period; we've had whole
   meetings devoted to that, but nobody has questions when we do it that
   way) and we might be able to do better at getting questions/problems that
   are beyond the scope of an InstallFest or mailing list question handled
   well)
4) socializing) there's time to chat about whatever at meetings, we don't
   object if the talk list veers off-topic unless it's getting unfriendly;
   we could certainly be more intentional and/or structured about this part,
   but I think we do pretty well.

> 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).

Vision statement: "We like Linux".
Or perhaps more realistically: "We aim to increase Linux usage in the north
bay area, particularly Sonoma County, by both showing people what Linux can
do and by making it easier for people to start using Linux."

(in other words, local advocacy is our real goal; we acheive it via
education and support and socialization just happens to be facilitated.)

I've (we?) tried to avoid any kind of blatant advocacy, partially because it
just doesn't work, partially because it's annoying and partially because it
involves way too much energy.  If you ask us which OS is best for a task,
we'll of course give you a biased answer that steers you towards Linux, a
*nix or a free (speech) OS.  We won't help you with windows or MacOS beyond
getting it to dual-boot with Linux.  That's about as far as we go with
advocacy.

> 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.  

We have 136 people on talk, 176 on announce.  218 unique emails between
them.  (some may be duplicates that sort and uniq don't recognize as such.)

> 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?

I'd like to know these answers, too.  As well as what things we think we're
doing okay at that we're not really doing all that well at.
-- 
    Eric Eisenhart   Freedom is slavery.      http://eric.eisenhart.com/
 ^  ICQ#: 48217244   Ignorance is strength.   eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
/e\ Perl&SQL Coder   War is peace.            IRC Nicks: Falsch Freiheit
---                        -- George Orwell



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