[Wolves] Meeting room

[Alan Pope]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 09:32:53PM +0100, Jono Bacon wrote:
> Don´t get me wrong in my last post - I am not in any way saying that
> there is anything wrong with formal LUGs, and many people do indeed
> enjoy formal LUGs, but personally I prefer social LUGs.
> 

No, I appreciate that. 

> I think the point you make about combining the formal and social is
> interesting, and it is a technique other groups use, such as the Perl
> Mongers.

Indeed, in London the Greater London LUG has the whole format + social meet
combo deal which is of course much easier to do in a city with (arguably)
good transport links, and a wide selection of venues. For LUGs which have
geographically spread membership this is clearly trickier.

> The problem we have with Wolves LUG is that there have been
> efforts in the past to have talks at the LUG, and I remember myself on
> the list trying to encourage talks at meetings, but there was
> virtually no interest.

Heh, sounds familiar. In Hants we restarted (under Tony Whitmore) the whole
"talk" thing and it's been a real mixed bag. Generally speaking people enjoy
attending them but don't always fancy giving talks. We make them available
to download as video [0] and to stream from google video [1]. They've only
been on Google for the last few months and they've had thousands of views
and hundreds of downloads. The most popular one being "Introduction to Perl:
The friendly programming language" [2] would you believe! :)

The problem we've had is that it's a massive amount of effort to organise
that kind of thing. Getting a good venue as you mentioned is definately a
clincher. Along with that as I'm sure you know there's finding someone who
can actually talk authoritatively on a subject and do it fairly well. We
found that it's not important for someone to be a tremendously professional
speaker with masses of experience, but so long as they have something to
say, and they know a bit about it, that's generally good enough.

Little details like the DV cam, encoding to at least 2 formats, uploading to
archive.org and video.google are of course nice touches that aren't really
required, but means that non-attendees can still get to see the talks.

> I know there was a list of volunteered talks on
> the wiki, but when asked, virtually no-one came forward.

Heh. Yeah that sounds terribly familiar too. Tony did a great job of
organising the talks. We've had meets with 4 separate talks spread over a
few hours. It's worth noting our meets last most of Saturday (10:30 to
17:00) and have two rooms, one for general Bring-A-Box activities with a
massive pipe to the 'net and a separate room for the talks. We are *very*
spoilt with that venue! Then again the last meet we had was in a church hall
in Aldershot which whilst orders of magnitude smaller and less well equipped
was still a great place to get together.

I think Tony had to make a huge amount of effort in his own time to organise
the talks (and everything else to do with being the chairman of the LUG) and
that's what contributed to him deciding to step down this year.

So yeah, it's really hard getting people to do the talks, but it's worth it
when they do!

> Of course,
> there is nothing wrong with people not wanting to give talks, and we
> all live busy lives, but it gave me the impression that the LUG is not
> naturally a LUG who puts on talks and then goes to the pub afterwards
> for some social chat.
> 

That's an easy conclusion to draw to be fair. However it all boils down to -
and this may be contentious - people just can't be arsed. End of story. You
and I may be passionately "into" FLOSS but some people aren't. Some are
"just" in it for the social side - which is of course fine. Some are in
their LUG to further their knowledge and maybe feel they don't really have
any need to give back. Others I suspect just lead $NORMAL lives - have kids,
animals, houses, gardens and jobs that need their attention more than a
bunch of fat sweaty geeks in a curry house :) Then there's the possibility
that Linux is just *so* *damn* *easy* to use these days *cough* that people
don't have the *need* for LUGs as much as they used to..?

That doesn't mean that anyone is better or worse than anyone else in the
community. People give what they can. If they can manage to reply to the odd
mailing list posting helping people out then that's just as great as someone
who gives a talk at a LUG meet, everyone wins.

Does make it any easier to round up vi^H^Hvolunteers to give talks though :(

> What I would love to see is exactly what happened when we first went
> to Spice Avenue - we hold it in the room upstairs where we have our
> own space, someone gives a talk, and we have some social discussion
> afterwards.

Sounds perfect to me. I'd come.

(If I didn't live 2 hours away) :)

> This seems to tick each of the boxes we want -
> presentations, social atmosphere and an integrated LUG. The challenge
> here though is that we need to pull together as a LUG to make it
> happen.

Yup. Don't take this the wrong way but it needs strong leadership just as
much as it needs a good bunch of members.

> This means volunteering for talks helping to organise
> meetings.

I think you're delluded if you think you'll get a queue of people
volunteering for talks. From my experience you need to ask people. Simon
Morris who's also on this list is "chairman" of Greater London LUG and he
has to do this for them, I'm sure he can enlighten us on the amount of
effort/work he has to make to get talks sorted. I guess it's helpful for him
that being in London he has both a large membership to cull from (400+ IIRC).

> I think if we have some of this, we could get things in a
> more even keel. :)
> 

I agree, there's something about that mix of social, box hacking and talks
that seems to "do it" for me. ;)

> Oh, and as to your question about bringing LUGs together as part of my
> Canonical job, one area I am *really* keen to work on are LoCo groups,
> and the LUG community is obviously very tightly related. In fact, I
> have a note in my TomBoy notes to give you a shout this week Popey. :)
> 

Uh-oh.

> >On the flipside maybe it's time to put more LUG back into LUGRadio too?
> 
> Its funny, we get this every so often, and the point makes the
> assumption that we are not particularly interested in LUGs these days.

I guess I'm not necessarily saying you're not interested in LUGs, maybe more
that I think you guys are in a very influentual position. With the moniker
"most listened to linux based podcast" you have quite a listenership to
reach. A lot of ears to tickle with what's right and good :)

> We are indeed interested, but again, we need LUGs to mail us and let
> us know their cool things so we can cue people up for interviews and
> segments.

Not sure they will call you. Take Linux Format as an analogy. You may be
aware they've been actively contacting LUGs in the UK asking for content.
They know the LUGs won't come to them. I'd say you're in a similar position.
Maybe you need to hire a producer to organise this stuff so you celeb types
can turn up in your "phat motas" and earn your wedge without having to do
any prep ;)

> We have had virtually no mails about taking part in a show
> from LUGs, and I myself would love to see that change. Maybe this is a
> good goal for Season 4. :)
> 

Sounds like a plan. 

All the best.
Al.

p.s. apologies for the babbling like a village idiot, I do that.

[0] http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TechTalks
[1] http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=hampshire+linux+user+group
[2] http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-876009974056913377