[Fife Linux Users Group] Fife Lug Meetings

[James Eaton-Lee]

Lots of good ideas - this has spawned a nice discussion - at risk of
sounding impudent, I'd like to propose the following as general ideas
resulting from the discussion (which, perhaps, we could decide are
things we want to say yes/no/maybe to at the 'red fort' meeting, if we
choose to have one)

(1) We need regular meetings in an informal, easy to get to venue
(2) We need (semi)regular functions which are more formal than meetings
(talks, installdays, workshops, spring to mind)
(3) We need a clear line of contact re: who organises meetings and who's
responsible for what

If I've missed anything, please shout! I didn't mean to miss anything,
but this e-mail was drafted fairly quickly.

All of these are good ideas, and I think we can probably reach a
concensus we're all happy with; in particular, I do think that (3) is a
good idea; people do seem much happier to make one-on-one contact with
someone who they can ask questions about the meeting to - when the
meetings were being held at my house, I had a quite frequent incoming
stream of e-mails from all concerned asking about the venue, what we
were going to discuss, etc, and people did seem happier to have someone
responsible for the answers to discuss things with offlist.

Perhaps in lieu of a formal membership structure, we should nominate
someone on a semi-permanent basis (ie. they keep the role for a few
months at a time to ensure people aren't confused by point-of-contact
turnover) to 'take ownership' of the meeting - not to organise/run/fund
it (because I think we can between us do all of those things in a
distributed fashion), but simply to act as a central node which
aggregates information about the meeting (and maintains information
about the current state of the meeting) and, if polled, will reply with
such information to a client. :P