[Nottingham] Response on awareness day

[Simon]

On 11/3/05, Michael Simms <michael at tuxgames.com> wrote:
> Well, greetings to all LUG members.
>
> I'm sorry, but this email is not going to be a nice one.
>
> 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 personally do not know any local companies that would be interested,
so I didn't send any information.

> 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.

Surely it would have made sense not to purchase any stamps until you
had a list of names?

> 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.

Last mail about this, you were asked to provide the information you
gave to the newspapers. This indicated to myself and maybe other
people that you already gave them information.

> 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.

I can not speak for everyone else but I didn't think I would be able
to take time off work at such short notice. I did arrange time off as
of today which I was going to mention on the list. But..

> 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.

I offered help regarding posters and making the event known within the
universities.

> 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.

Surely some of us can do something over the weekend and get them
posted Monday? It can't be that 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?

I arranged time off on the Friday and Saturday and I could have given
some time on Friday. But due to recent events, do I even bother? A lot
of people have working lives, families, children etc. Not everyone is
able to commit themselves to take a day off work, day away from the
family. By the tone of your email you seem to expect everyone on the
list to be there. That isn't possible.

Also I do think a lot of people on the list don't know exactly what is
expected of them? I use Linux a little but I'm not an expert and I
certainly don't use it in a business environment. If somebody asked me
about samba, terminal services, networking etc then I wouldn't have a
clue. So is there a point in somebody like me being there (and I
admit, I'm a user not an expert).

I would still like to help out as much as I can if thats possible.

Simon