[GRLUG] Offer to Host Meeting

[Eric Hartwell]

nice pic! thanks. :P 
we should do tshirts and other promo stuff again. :) 



----- Original Message ----
From: Charter <ajabma at chartermi.net>
To: grlug at grlug.org
Sent: Tue, November 10, 2009 3:50:05 PM
Subject: Re: [GRLUG] Offer to Host Meeting

Those were the days!
http://www.abmas.com/linux/glug-011.jpg

Bob Kline wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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 <http://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
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