[NBLUG/talk] LUGs, venue, advocacy, dues/incorporation, and other thoughts

[Brad Morrison]

Rick: I also emailed the Pritchards from on July 16 and on July 18 I 
heard back from Steven. I will include you on my response to them, I 
just haven't gotten to it yet. I'll save all of that conversation for 
between the 4 of us and then we can report back here anything that might 
be particularly interesting or useful to the larger audience.

On a separate note, thank you for all of your work over the years 
maintaining LUGs and the various associated documentation! That's a lot 
of thankless tasks and even though I've just barely scratched the 
surface of what you have done, it is pretty cool to have you share your 
stories and knowledge with us.

Derek: social, technical, advocacy = sure, that makes sense. I assume 
that you have observed this about me already, but I do not have a 
computer science degree, nor nearly as much experience with technology 
as most of the NBLUG participants that I have met so far. So I can't 
keep up on the technical conversations, but it is still interesting to 
learn (sort of). I tend to be more interested in our discussions on 
various differences between Linux distros and package management systems 
and why some packages are capable of being updated more frequently than 
others based on which libraries a particular distro may ship with or 
whatever. I was less interested in the conversation we had about Comcast 
internet service and the various technical aspects of the problems you 
and Matt discussed last time. But I faded out after a while and left, 
and that's OK too.

Venue: I did contact Sonoma Clean Power about their conference room on 
July 13 and I heard back July 21 - they are only willing to let 
community organizations that share their primary focus of combating the 
climate crisis to use their classroom.

     *Allan: have you heard anything back from Sonic yet?

Advocacy: I am more interested in this aspect, in large part because I 
can't contribute much to the technical development of open source 
software. Part of my advocacy work involves more communication about 
open source software, even if just to the NBLUG list. Even if we doubled 
attendance at the monthly meetings (to the mighty number of 15!), we 
would still only have a small fraction of the people on the NBLUG 
talk/announce email lists (236/454 people). So at this point, it feels a 
bit like inside sales, rather than the community organization equivalent 
of cold calling - tabling at events. I am also interested in referring 
people that are interested in contributing to other open source projects 
via NBLUG. That is why I try to post links to other projects I have 
heard of or interacted with. With Derek's encouragement, I recently 
switched the OS on my OnePlus 6T phone to LineageOS 
(https://lineageos.org/) from the stock/T-Mobile version of OnePlus' 
Oxygen OS. That was quite a big project for me! I also decided to go 
without the Google Play store and will hopefully be able to delete my 
rarely used Google account in the coming months. That would be an 
example of expanding the use of open source software within our own 
membership. As far as attracting new members or new users of Linux, I 
would love to have some referrals to helpful websites for newbies. I 
usually refer people to Distrowatch (https://distrowatch.com/), if they 
are already interested in Linux, but not currently using it. There are 
far more people that use Apple/Microsoft/Google OS software that don't 
even know what open source software is. For them I usually start with 
the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software).

Dues: I totally agree that it doesn't make sense for NBLUG to 
incorporate as a nonprofit or collect dues/donations, unless there was a 
very specific goal in mind. My points about organizational structure and 
membership dues were more related to my "discovery" that there is no 
larger national/international LUG that NBLUG is a part of. I have given 
the example of the NBEAA (https://nbeaa.org/) and their relationship to 
the national EVA (https://www.myeva.org/) many times. Not all of the 
people on NBEAA's Google Groups list are members of the EVA, but for 
those that are, I believe that the national organization reimburses the 
local chapter for some % of the dues from the local members. The 
national organization also provides the 501c3 nonprofit status to its 
local, affiliated chapters (as long as they follow some basic 
rules/bylaws) and coordinates the local chapters bank accounts. That is 
my understanding of the situation. IF there were a similar 
national/international organization of LUGs, then  I would highly 
encourage NBLUG to consider joining/affiliating. Since that doesn't 
currently exist, it is a non-issue for now. And it would take months or 
years to get something like that off the ground, even if I gave my 
notice on Monday and turned that into a full time project affiliated 
with an existing organization in the Linux/open source space (very 
unlikely to happen). My larger point was that having a 
national/international organization of LUGs seems like a really big 
untapped opportunity to increase the interest in Linux & open source 
software on the community/individual level.

Hope everyone had a good workweek!

Brad

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2022 11:52:59 -0700
> From: "Derek B. Noonburg"<derekn at foolabs.com>
> To:talk at nblug.org
> Subject: Re: [NBLUG/talk] NBLUG participants
> Message-ID: <20220719115259.25ddde1d at numbat>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> I think of NBLUG as having three overlapping functions: social,
> technical, and advocacy.  (Rick's HOWTO phrases things a little
> differently, but I think we're close enough.)  We've been doing pretty
> much 100% social since we started meeting again at Flagship.
>
> On the technical side, we used to have some sort of talk at almost everysort of
> meeting.  I'd really like to get back to doing that, even if it's
> something like every second or third meeting to start.  But we need to
> find a venue before that can happen.
>
> As for advocacy, I know NBLUG used to do installfests, but I don't
> think there's much demand for that anymore.  I'm open to suggestions
> here.
>
> I don't see us trying to collect dues or actively soliciting donations.
> I think that would add a layer of bureaucracy that no one really wants
> to deal with.
>
>  From my point of view, the priority right now should be to find an
> alternate meeting location -- one that allows us to do presentations.
> (It would also be nice to have an indoor venue before winter).
>
> - Derek
>
>
> On Sun, 17 Jul 2022 08:07:49 -0700
> Brad Morrison<bradmorrison at sonic.net>  wrote:
>
>> Hey Frank,
>>
>> Thanks for providing the exact numbers! I didn't realize that there
>> are so many people on the talk (236) and announce (454) email lists -
>> that's a lot!
>>
>> For comparison to the North Bay Electric Auto Association (NBEAA -
>> https://nbeaa.org/), NBEAA only has about 151 people on their largest
>> Google Group email list, but they regularly get about double the
>> number of participants at their monthly Zoom meetings (about 14-16)
>> compared to the number of people that we can get to show up to Spring
>> Thai/Flagship Taproom's outdoor tables in Cotati (about 6-8). Just
>> for comparison's sake, the NBEAA has about $6280 in their bank
>> account (mostly dues reimbursements from their "parent" nonprofit
>> organization the Electric Vehicle Association -
>> https://www.myeva.org/) vs. NBLUG's about $140 in the cash box.
>>
>> If anyone has any suggestions or feedback about how we could get more
>> people involved in NBLUG or more people on the email list that want
>> to show up to the monthly meetings or even just more sharing via the
>> IRC channel or this talk email list, feel free to let us/me know. My
>> main priority for NBLUG/the larger Linux & open source ecosystem is
>> to get more people involved (whether they are users or developers or
>> whatever). That springs from my hunch that more users equates to more
>> interest/activity which leads to more donations/funds to pay more
>> developers to grow the capabilities of open source software in the
>> eternal competition with closed/proprietary/corporate software &
>> systems.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Brad