[lug] Re: BLUG Planning for 2002 and beyond

[Chris Riddoch]

"J. Wayde Allen" <wallen at lug.boulder.co.us> writes:
> While it is flattering that everyone seems to be content with the current
> arrangement, I do think that we need to get some new people involved with
> the group or risk becoming stagnant.  In order to force the issue, it
> looks like I must personally refrain from scheduling any future BLUG
> meetings.  Otherwise, I think we will simply continue on in this mode.

Now that I'm done with finals, I would like to take this moment to say
that I really appreciate Wayde's effort. I've been trying to take a
little of the load off his efforts this fall, but as a full-time
student at CU, scheduling December's meeting (which was the evening
immediately before finals start) was simply too much for me to think
about, so I passed it off to Wayde. Thanks again for taking care of
that.

BLUG is important to me. Important enough that I'm willing to put up
an effort to make sure that things keep happening. I've got a couple
names for people who have expressed an interest in giving talks, which
is great. I started a student group on campus so that we could use a
room to hold BLUG meetings in, as a temporary measure.

So yeah, I'm volunteering to make this work.  At the same time, I
shouldn't kid myself into thinking that I can singlehandedly take over
for Wayde. (Yeah, I'm learning some priority and time management. I
hope the forgiving folks I 'helped' with the CLIQ's organization will
understand this.) I have a month before classes start again, and I'll
probably be just as busy as I have been. The next month will give me a
chance to decide how to balance things.

0) Who's with me? I volunteer to do administrative things in the
*immediate* short-term and delegate other stuff to people willing to
have things delegated to them - as long as someone else is willing to
catch the task when finals come around or such things. I don't think
there's a terribly good reason to have a formal nomination and
election system, as long as we can organize ourselves. That means I'll
need help! (Logo: penguin pointing at camera, large-type caption "BLUG
wants YOU!")

1) Let's figure out a stable place where we can meet. Wayde, if you
can email me privately with a list of contacts, I'll do some follow up
for you. It's *possible* we could use the room at the university, but
I'm wary of doing that when classes aren't in session and without a
decent proportion of university-goers.

2) I'll ask some people about giving January's talk. There were a
couple people who've spoken to me after recent BLUG meetings I'd like
to follow up on.

3) I've mentioned this before: I think now's the time to do a
mini-expo/installfest. This may seem premature given that we don't
have a stable meeting space, but I think the beginning of the
semester/year is going to be the best time to do this. As a student
group, I suspect I can get us a suitable room and power for free.

Here's the idea: At the beginning of the semester/year, when people
are more willing to make fresh starts, we set aside the Saturday after
that really huge football game I only watch for the commercials to do
this.  It's long enough in the future to allow proper planning and
execution, I think. The UMC is under construction, so we can't hold it
there, but there are other suitably large areas on campus we could
use.

This would involve getting people and their computers out - some to
give demos, some to get help installing Linux, some to have resources
for people doing the installations... printouts of important
documentation, CDs of various distributions to hand out, power,
network, and similar facilities, people being geeky and helpful,
etc. Other people could bring their systems to show off some
particular tool they use Linux for. I think a tournament involving
linux games could attract some attention as well.

I haven't put a huge effort into advertising on campus
because... well, I haven't. And I'll need some help. But I'm *sure*
there are quite a lot of people that would be interested in this sort
of thing, students, faculty, and probably a fair number of
BLUGgers. It'll be one big party. It's too big a project for one
person.

Oh, and did I mention that I'll need some help with this?

-- 
Chris Riddoch       | epistemological
socket at peakpeak.com | humility