[GRLUG] Offer to Host Meeting

[Michael Mol]

Before we thrust the task of organizing meetings on one or two
individuals, let's try some collaborative problem-solving.  First,
identify the problems.

1) Most of us are occupied people, with obligations to family, church,
school and/or paycheck. Scheduling is a perennial problem.

2) We're spread out all over the west side of the state.  We have
people in Muskegon/Grand Haven/Holland, Lowell, Grandville(hey!),
Jenison, Byron Center, downtown Grand Rapids, Rockford, Plainsfield,
and just about any other regional locale with more than ten thousand
people to its name.

3) We don't have a consistent idea for what to do with meetings.

4) We don't have a regularly-available, suitable meeting place.

Next, let's look at key characteristics of the group:

* We're all aware of Linux, which means we have (at minimum)
above-average technical ability or interest, and despite the modern
prevalence of Linux in server contexts today, it was certainly the
road less traveled at one point.
* Meeting topics seem to be an excuse to meet up, chat and interact.


First idea:

I'm thinking we might try dropping "topics" as a requirement for
having meetings. Remove the requirement for presentations, and you
remove the requirement for their infrastructure.  You've also made
meetings less formal, which opens up additional possibilities. For
example, we could try meeting in the group room of a bar or buffet
restaurant, which wouldn't be as noisy as the main areas.

Second idea:

We're all geeks, lets experiment with some other interaction mediums.
We've tried the IRC approach, and that hasn't work out too well; There
are only three people in #grlug on Freenode at the moment, and there
were two until I joined a minute or two ago.

We can also try using an XMPP server, with a MUC chat room for the
folks on the mailing list.  Also, Google Wave is an extension of XMPP;
I've played with it a little bit via Google's interface, and it's
kinda neat. I wonder what that would be like, not tied to Google.

There's also voice chat...Anyone want to try setting up an Asterisk
PBX for SIP voice chat?  Could be interesting, and practical
experience for anyone who wants to participate and try setting up AIX
trunking and the like.

And then there's the mother of them all, video chat.  I played around
with ustream on Windows, but never got it working on Linux; My
laptop's webcam's V4L support didn't seem compatible with Flash's
framegrabbing and encoding abilities.

Third idea:

Even changing up the nature of the meetings doesn't solve the
scheduling problem.  I'm not an expert on the subject of scheduling,
but isn't there some way people can tie an availability schedule to a
locale radius, and find the times and places with the greatest
overlap?  It sounds like a three-dimensional volumetric intersection.
I'm not a fan of a solution that requires paying for a web service,
though.  Even meetup.com seems a bit off for me.

Part of this requires actually collecting the data, though.


... I'm not saying I can or have the time to implement any of these,
but I thought I'd stir up conversation.

-- 
:wq