[Lancaster] meeting last night

[David Smith]

Andy, thanks for writing this up, and for the effort you've put into this.

A few notes from my end, seeing as I couldn't make it last night.

> - Most people seemed to feel that there wasn't the energy or the numbers 
> in the group at the moment to keep a fortnightly meeting going, and that 
> if we're going to have other meetings than the monthly pub meets, it 
> would be more realistic to think of doing these once a month or once 
> every two months.

I'd agree with this. I think fortnightly meetings would be a bit too 
much of a strain given the group size at the minute. I am in agreement 
that a fairly regular schedule of talks would be good though and, as 
much as I like the idea of a regular venue, the realist in me keeps 
saying that given the current group size, it may well not be feasible.

> - We talked a fair bit about what the group could be doing besides the 
> pub meets. It was suggested that we need to be fairly clear about what 
> we're trying to achieve here - e.g. outreach to people who don't know 
> about linux is a different thing to having technical talks for people 
> who are already interested. There seemed to be more interest in the 
> second of these than the first.

I'd agree with the tech talks approach for now largely given the current 
group size. Introducing people to Open Source can be done as odd 
meetings at the minute, but given a lot of our current members are 
already using / fairly au fait with Linux and Open Source, having a lot 
of those sorts of meetings would grow tiring, quick.
I would be quite in favour of advocating maybe one in 3 or 4 of the 
planned meetings being handed over to a 'hands-on' meeting, 
demonstrating free software (on different platforms) and showing people 
how they can use FOSS instantly. It may also be reasonable to devote a 
certain portion of such an evening as a talk, explaining some of the 
benefits and philosophies behind the open source movement.

> - A few people suggested talks that they might be able to give - 
> summarising pros and cons of different distros, digital photography, 
> advanced networking stuff like how the email system works, more on linux 
> audio, and how to install debian on a reflashable embedded network 
> storage device.

Sounds good.

> - Mark Keating suggested that another possible venue would be a room at 
> the offices his company have on White Cross. (Thanks for this). My 
> feeling is that this would probably be better for the moment at least - 
> one of the reasons I was thinking of the Basement is that it is near the 
> centre of town, so easier to find for people who might want to drop in 
> occasionally to a regular meeting. Also that we could set up the 
> computers there how we want, but this isn't so important for doing 
> occasional talks as for a more regular venue. Neither of these reasons 
> apply so much for occasional, more technically focussed meetings, which 
> seemed to be the general consensus on what we should be aiming at.

Thanks also to Mark for that offer. To be honest, given the above (and 
our current group size), I'm less of the opinion that the venue and its 
location itself _particularly_ matters. The more accessible it is, the 
better - of course - but as long as we can all get there and it provides 
a bit of space to not have to worry about talking over other people in 
the same room (ie, the pub, unfortunately, isn't an ideal venue for 
talks / presentations) then I'm happy.

> - Another thing that was discussed was the idea that if we're doing 
> outreach type activities, we should make these about open source in 
> general rather than linux in particular, as this is an easier way into 
> open source stuff for most people, who may be reluctant to change their 
> OS and lose all the skills they have learned with it. As far as I 
> remember there was general agreement that this was the right way to go.

Full agreement here.

> That's about all I can remember at the moment. The main positive thing 
> that came from the meeting was that there was a pretty definite interest 
> in having monthly or bi-monthly technical talks / demos, so maybe we 
> could talk on the list or at the next meeting about how to get these going?
> 
> Thanks to everyone who came, and see you in a couple of weeks.

Thanks for writing this up. Definitely lots to think about.

Best,

Dave