[Nottingham] Response on awareness day

[Michael Simms]

Well, greetings to all LUG members.

I'm sorry, but this email is not going to be a nice one.

To be quite frank, I am disappointed, bordering on disgusted with the
LUG members, and this includes everyone on the list.

Do you know - myself and a few others have invested a lot of time and
effort into this awareness day. All we asked of the rest of you is a
little bit of a commitment that would have taken 10 minutes of your
time.

A week ago I asked people on the mailing list to send in the addresses
of 5 different schools or companies that may be receptive to Linux. We
have 400 people, give or take, on the mailing list, and how many have
responded? ZERO.

I have 100 stamps here with nowhere to send their letters to. I would
like to personally thank each and every one of you for wasting my money
on that.

I asked the LUG if we could have a discussion on the mailing list about
the information we would send to a newspaper that not only was willing
to put in a free ad, but actually wanted to do a *story* on Linux and
the awareness day. How much response from that have we had? ZERO. Its
too late now, we missed the window. We lost the chance.

Martin has asked for people to let him know if they can do the awareness
day on the Friday. How many people have come back to him and say they
can? ZERO.

So far Ive invested about 70 pounds of my personal money, and a fair bit
of my time (yes, I run 2 companies and work about 12-14 hours a day, and
I managed to find the time, so lack of time is NOT an excuse). I know
martin expends a lot of time on the LUG, and he is almost as busy as me.
And yet it seems that only the two of us are going to be at the
awareness day on Friday. Well thats OK because seeing as none of you
bothered to send me any addresses, we have no publicity for it so
probably nobody will be showing up anyway!

So, now Ive had a rant, which I feel is fairly justified), lets look to
what we are going to do about it.

Do people really not care? Do we want to stop bothering to do the talks,
and try and raise awareness on Linux? Do we just want to turn this into
a social club? If so, then thats fine, a group exists for its members.
But as it stands, nobody has said that, and its NOT BLOODY FAIR on the
minority of us that put a SHEDLOAD of effort in to this thing, and
everyone else just sits around doing nothing, yet are among the first to
complain when things don't go the way they want them to.

So, what do people WANT? I personally feel the LUG should be about
promoting Linux, getting the word out, helping the members with
problems, as well as meeting down the pub for a pint. But if I'm in the
minority, thats cool - I'll stop wasting my money and time on these
aspects of the LUG, it will mean I can buy a few more rounds on the
social evenings. Im not going to ditch the LUG if it goes in a different
direction, I dont think anyone would. But it is frustrating and unfair
for a very small number of us to do a load of work on LUG events, and to
have a few small very reasonable requests for help ignored by all 400
LUG members that all benefit from the help of the LUG members whenever
THEY need it. And bear in mind if we change it to a social group only,
well, why the hell should we give any of the many of you that have asked
for help advice, the help and advice we have so freely offered in the
past. You can't have it both ways. Either give as well as take, or we
can take that aspect out of the LUG. Whatever the members want is fine,
but its not FAIR for it to be completely overbalanced.

Im not suggesting everyone goes out and becomes massively active LUG
members, that is unrealistic. But I do think that people should pull
their weight, and in this, the lug over the last week has utterly
failed. Without exception. None of you can finger point and say 'it
wasnt me' because it was. None of you can say 'sorry, I was too busy'
because trust me, you are probably not as busy as I am, running 2
companies. No finger pointing, no excuses, accept that you have let down
the LUG when you were asked for a VERY small time commitment. 5 or 10
minutes is all it would have taken.

Its too late now to send me addresses, I said right at the word go, that
I wouldn't have time to spend a whole day printing out and posting
letters, and I don't, so the offer is withdrawn. We needed to post them
on Friday and so now its too late. 

So lets look at a week on Friday. Are you all going to let us down on
that too? So far its me and Martin will be the only LUG members who will
be manning the awareness day on Friday. Martin is taking a day off of
work that he can ill afford to do, I am finding some way to squeeze in
the hours in among everything else I have to do, which is going to be a
royal pain for me, but I'm doing it... is anyone else going to put their
money where their mouth is, or is it just going to be the two of us?

Thanks
-- 
Michael Simms - CEO, Tux Games
http://www.tuxgames.com