[GRLUG] Offer to Host Meeting

[Bob Kline]

Three or four years ago Eric H.
would open up a lab at ITT and
let people bring machines, and
just have install fests, and whatever
else people wanted to do.  Others,
like Ron Lauzon, might bring some
new gadget, a  new distribution, and
a stack of CD blanks. John-Thomas once brought
a half dozen hard drives to use for different
installations. Dave X would bring in a
home made projector and fire it up.

Those gatherings seemed popular.

See http://omnibus.bobanna.com/grlug_meet_050305/

March 5, 2005.

The value was in getting a group of
people together, and letting them match
up with something of interest.  People
basically got out of it what they put in
to it, plus the expertise of the others,
and might just resolve some issue or
learn how to do something.

Would that venue be of interest to
people now?  The advantage is that
people can come with issues of interest
to them, and just toss things around.
But for Eric's making his facilities
available, there was a high degree of
informality, and no real need for an overall
agenda.  People each make up their own.

   -- Bob





On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 8:04 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://shinobu.grlug.org/pipermail/grlug/attachments/20091109/6e94495e/attachment-0001.htm