Three or four years ago Eric H. <br>would open up a lab at ITT and<br>let people bring machines, and <br>just have install fests, and whatever<br>else people wanted to do. Others,<br>like Ron Lauzon, might bring some <br>
new gadget, a new distribution, and<br>a stack of CD blanks. John-Thomas once brought <br>a half dozen hard drives to use for different<br>installations. Dave X would bring in a <br>home made projector and fire it up. <br>
<br>Those gatherings seemed popular. <br><br>See <a href="http://omnibus.bobanna.com/grlug_meet_050305/">http://omnibus.bobanna.com/grlug_meet_050305/</a><br><br>March 5, 2005.<br><br>The value was in getting a group of<br>
people together, and letting them match <br>up with something of interest. People <br>basically got out of it what they put in<br>to it, plus the expertise of the others,<br>and might just resolve some issue or<br>learn how to do something.<br>
<br>Would that venue be of interest to <br>people now? The advantage is that <br>people can come with issues of interest<br>to them, and just toss things around.<br>But for Eric's making his facilities<br>available, there was a high degree of<br>
informality, and no real need for an overall<br>agenda. People each make up their own.<br><br> -- Bob<br><br><br> <br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Michael Mol <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mikemol@gmail.com">mikemol@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Before we thrust the task of organizing meetings on one or two<br>
individuals, let's try some collaborative problem-solving. First,<br>
identify the problems.<br>
<br>
1) Most of us are occupied people, with obligations to family, church,<br>
school and/or paycheck. Scheduling is a perennial problem.<br>
<br>
2) We're spread out all over the west side of the state. We have<br>
people in Muskegon/Grand Haven/Holland, Lowell, Grandville(hey!),<br>
Jenison, Byron Center, downtown Grand Rapids, Rockford, Plainsfield,<br>
and just about any other regional locale with more than ten thousand<br>
people to its name.<br>
<br>
3) We don't have a consistent idea for what to do with meetings.<br>
<br>
4) We don't have a regularly-available, suitable meeting place.<br>
<br>
Next, let's look at key characteristics of the group:<br>
<br>
* We're all aware of Linux, which means we have (at minimum)<br>
above-average technical ability or interest, and despite the modern<br>
prevalence of Linux in server contexts today, it was certainly the<br>
road less traveled at one point.<br>
* Meeting topics seem to be an excuse to meet up, chat and interact.<br>
<br>
<br>
First idea:<br>
<br>
I'm thinking we might try dropping "topics" as a requirement for<br>
having meetings. Remove the requirement for presentations, and you<br>
remove the requirement for their infrastructure. You've also made<br>
meetings less formal, which opens up additional possibilities. For<br>
example, we could try meeting in the group room of a bar or buffet<br>
restaurant, which wouldn't be as noisy as the main areas.<br>
<br>
Second idea:<br>
<br>
We're all geeks, lets experiment with some other interaction mediums.<br>
We've tried the IRC approach, and that hasn't work out too well; There<br>
are only three people in #grlug on Freenode at the moment, and there<br>
were two until I joined a minute or two ago.<br>
<br>
We can also try using an XMPP server, with a MUC chat room for the<br>
folks on the mailing list. Also, Google Wave is an extension of XMPP;<br>
I've played with it a little bit via Google's interface, and it's<br>
kinda neat. I wonder what that would be like, not tied to Google.<br>
<br>
There's also voice chat...Anyone want to try setting up an Asterisk<br>
PBX for SIP voice chat? Could be interesting, and practical<br>
experience for anyone who wants to participate and try setting up AIX<br>
trunking and the like.<br>
<br>
And then there's the mother of them all, video chat. I played around<br>
with ustream on Windows, but never got it working on Linux; My<br>
laptop's webcam's V4L support didn't seem compatible with Flash's<br>
framegrabbing and encoding abilities.<br>
<br>
Third idea:<br>
<br>
Even changing up the nature of the meetings doesn't solve the<br>
scheduling problem. I'm not an expert on the subject of scheduling,<br>
but isn't there some way people can tie an availability schedule to a<br>
locale radius, and find the times and places with the greatest<br>
overlap? It sounds like a three-dimensional volumetric intersection.<br>
I'm not a fan of a solution that requires paying for a web service,<br>
though. Even <a href="http://meetup.com" target="_blank">meetup.com</a> seems a bit off for me.<br>
<br>
Part of this requires actually collecting the data, though.<br>
<br>
<br>
... I'm not saying I can or have the time to implement any of these,<br>
but I thought I'd stir up conversation.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
:wq<br>
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