[Klug-general] Reminder - Social Meeting on Friday 12/1/07

[Kevin Groves]

Colin_The_Technician wrote:
>
> social meeting and our Virtual Meeting last night on IRC.  It really
> was quite busy.
Yes very busy. Will catch up with it all.
> if that was ok with you.  We discussed having our own hosted server so
> not relient on one member. 
The site is a Pipex hosted account. My company account which will be in
use for many years. to come. Maybe it might move to another ISP but for
the moment it's with Pipex and not on any of my machines.

Current facilities are PHP and MySQL. I have around 5-6gb space of which
1.5gb is currently in use. The website is running PHP Nuke. I already
have an install of Mambo, SugarCRM and Coppermine Gallery (a good
picture gallery system).

> I am also willing to help admin the mailing
> list, after some training as I know nothing about them.
It's Mailman. Quite easy  I will log in and see about multiple account
setups.
> I just want to make sure you know we are just 'stepping up to the
> plate' and helping out and not trying to take over the LUG.  You might
> say you are 'the least qualified' to run the LUG with your current
> computer usage, but you sure know a lot more than me :-)  So I can't
> 'run' it but I would like to help as much as I can.
>
> With that, what else would you like help with so we can get everyone
> organized and share the roles.
>
This is something I've been waiting for for a *long* time.

For a bit of history about KLUG from those of you who were not there in
early days. The LUG I took over from someone at Bromley College around
September 2001. We ran along side the Maidstone Computer Club until a
year and a half ago. That club needed the numbers to boost their
flagging membership so they offered room, an already formed club with
committee (charity status - so it's been interesting to read the
comments about that).

It was not ideal. The room was very small and cramped and we soon
started to out grow the room. The membership suffered because of this
and I was concerned that the LUG would die because of it. Also there
were membership fees which seemed excessive to us who only met once a
month and the other group who met weekly. Unfortunately the costs of the
room meant it had to be this way and that put a lot off so attendance
was bad. Things got far worse when the local council put the cost of
room up. I could see the writing on the wall and out of frustration and
fear that all this work would be wasted I took the risk of withdrawing
from our partners and seeing if we could go alone. Hoping that I could
find venues with little or no cost, one to entice membership, two to
avoid some of the legal requirements for charity status and
accounting/paper work and three to be in the spirit of Linux.

We went our separate ways and we have by shear luck and the huge
generosity of our membership been able to carry on while the other group
folded.

All the while I have been trying to coax members to be involved and
participate in the running of the LUG, but without a proper formal
organisation that charity status brings this has been hard. I have tried
various means at various points. I think the varried membership has now
reached critical mas and KLUG has now become of age. My little out burst
was my final attempt at trying to kick start some activity.

The 'roadshow' that has been in place for the past year  which is born
out of the wild attempt to fly seems to have gone reasonably well, and
those of you who I might have mentioned that one day I hope to host at
the Leas Cliffe Hall in Folkestone, dont think that was a joke. I was
and still am serious about that.

I hope the LUG can pull this together and we can finally take this where
it should go.

Kev,