[Beds] Moving forward

[Stephen Newey]

Hi all

Thanks for everyone who's replied so far to my little survey, seems  
we're up to 10 so far, including myself.

To summarise the results so far...
4 in Bedford, 2 in Leighton Buzzard, 1 in Dunstable and the rest with  
an interest in or spiritual connection to the county :)

Slackware, Fedora, RedHat, Debian and Ubuntu seem to be the preferred  
distros (in no particular order I hasten to add!). A nice mix I think.

What we seem to want from the LUG is some socialising, exchange of  
tech ideas and support, bit of career beneficial networking, and  
explosive soft drink experimentation amongst other things.

David Pashley's comments about the Beds LUG not previously having a  
suitable venue strikes a chord. Physical meetings in a pub are great  
for the socialising aspect of the group, but prefacing it with  
meeting up at a more well tooled venue technology wise seems like a  
good idea.

The University of Bedfordshire has recently formed with the  
University of Luton merging with the former DMU Polhill Campus in  
Bedford. I notice from their website they have a Linux computing lab:
http://www.beds.ac.uk/departments/computing/facilities/cis-labs
I suspect this will be at the Luton campus. It may be worth  
approaching them and finding out if they would be amenable to us  
holding future meetings at one of their sites.

Before we do that though, I think we perhaps need to grow the numbers  
and come up with compelling reasons to hold meetings in person.

To that end, I'd like to get access to the mailman admin for this  
list to see how many people are subscribed to get an impression of  
the potential size of the group as it stands. I think it'd also be a  
good idea to get a new website set up at the beds.lug.org.uk address  
to promote the group.

Is everyone happy for me to contact the lug.org.uk guys and apply to  
become admin of the group so that I can move forward with the above?

Cheers
Steve