[Lincs] Unrealistic expectations?

[Dave Pearson]

* Peter Cooper <peter at petercooper.co.uk> [2004-08-18 13:52:11 +0100]:

> I'm wrapping the two threads into one here to keep the traffic down ;-)

And there was me thinking that we wanted the traffic to be up. ;>

> On 18 Aug 2004, at 13:07, Dave Pearson wrote:
> 
> >* Boston is a lot closer to me than Lincoln but the main source of
> >  disinterest for me still remained. It would still have been a weekday
> >  evening drive, after work and personal commitments, to sit in a public
> >  house for an hour or two with a handful of strangers for no immediately
> >  obvious reason.
> 
> Interesting point. I'd suggest that, perhaps, location is everything in
> this case. I'm a Londoner living in Lincs although I spend a lot of time
> down south for work and pleasure. If someone announces a drink in a London
> related group, there's usually a good attendance. However, Lincs is very
> different, you pretty much HAVE to drive (no hopping on the tube) and
> everyone's really spread out (not all working within 20 minutes of the
> West End or something). Worse, the demographics here (fewer younger
> people, not many tech companies) make an organisation like the LLUG a
> fragile (though still valuable) thing indeed.

Nicely expanded. I think it's worth keeping in mind that the initial letter
of the name of this LUG is the name of a whole country and, IIRC, isn't
Lincolnshire the second largest and second least populated county in
England? The same effect as you mention above shows up just as well with
various astronomical societies too. Societies that are associated with large
cities and densely populated areas tend to have a very high attendance for
just about any form of meeting; our society, who meet a Woolsthorpe Manor
(Newton's old home for those who don't know), often struggle to get a good
attendance but we're not surprised or disappointed by this because we all
appreciate the problem of being in a not-very-populated area. For some of
the members it's as much as a 90 mile round trip to attend a meeting. That
takes a lot of planning and plenty of forewarning.

Moreover, we've only been at it for about two years and, as a group, we
still consider this to be the startup period. We've generally got a
long-term view of it.

> >In summary: the question at the moment seems to be "how should we
> >communicate"; I'm suggesting that a better question might be "why should
> >we communicate". The answer to the latter will probably provide an answer
> >to the former.
> 
> I think you've hit the nail on the head. I'd like to see how the founders
> of the group feel about this, because, at least in my case, I don't really
> know if this has all been discussed before. What's the mission statement
> of LLUG? Is it to spread the word of Linux, to allow Linux-heads to
> socialise, both, or neither?

Bingo! That's the important question. My own personal view on that would be
that such a group probably needs to start out as a gathering of
"Linux-heads" and then, once there is momentum, those interested can start
to think about the more "evangelical" side of things if it seems important.
Trying to do everything from the very start will probably cause frustration
and annoyance.

> I don't see anything in the meeting schedule that is particularly
> technical. The topics appear more suited to someone who knows how to use a
> computer, probably of the Windows persuasion, but would like to see how
> Linux can do things. This wouldn't discourage me from attending, however,
> as it's always good to meet people with similar interests, and to support
> the free software cause. 

To be clear: I wasn't really suggesting that there's anything wrong with the
proposed technical level of the mooted talks for the first meeting or any
subsequent meetings, I was trying to illustrate the more general problem of
what technical level a group as a whole works at. Thankfully, higher up in
your email, you managed to document this much more clearly than I did.

>                          In my experience with the Perl Mongers, advanced
> talks can actually attract a lot of beginners. Perl Monger groups also
> tend to be quite active for their size, although this may be due to Perl
> coders being even more cultish than Linux users ;-)

Indeed, the more focused a group is (and perl hacking is obviously more
focused a subject than a general interest in GNU/Linux) the more likely it
is that highly technical talks will be appreciated.

> I might close by coming back to the demographics again. If we're aiming at
> beginners, then how do we 'sell' ourselves? The people in Lincolnshire who
> could benefit from Linux the most have probably never heard of it.

Personally I'd have thought it more important that the LUG actually become
fully established first; once that's done then wider "mission statements"
can be worried about.

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