[Wolves] IMPORTANT, ALL READ: Making the LUG rock

Jono Bacon jonobacon at gmail.com
Tue Sep 5 11:19:59 BST 2006


Hi all,

We have had some great discussion recently about what kind of LUG we
are and where we are going. I now want to turn this into something we
can work with.

The way I see it, we are a community of like-minded people, and as a
community we need to collaborate together to make stuff happen. I
officially have the term 'LUGMaster' but that does not translate into
'Jono does all the work'. As you all know, I am intensely busy, and I
just dont have time to make the LUG my single focus - I used to in the
early days, and I used to spend my time getting meetings sorted, but I
don't have as much time these days. I am still more than happy to be
LUGMaster, look after the list, help organise meetings, but this needs
to be more of a collaborative effort with the entire group. This
collaborative falls into a bunch of areas:

 * Organising meetings
 * Giving talks
 * Keeping the website up to date
 * Mailing list admin
 * Helping new members to feel at home

I think the priority here is organising meetings and giving talks. It
seems a popular option for our meetings to have the following
forumula:

 * Meet in a fairly social location such as a room in a restaurant,
but one where have our own space
 * Have one or two talks about something
 * Have plenty of discussion
 * Be big enough so people can move around easily and talk to different people
 * Allow for people to eat and preferably bring their own drinks

In the short term, I think the room upstairs at Spice Avenue suits
this fine, and I will contact them to see if we can use it regularly.
If not, we should find somewhere else.

So, in the meantime, we need to decide who is doing talks and on what
subjects. I suggest we update the wiki to reflect this.

Now, this is the important point. Some of you will have read th above
and thought "someone else will do it", "I don't feel confident enough
to talk" or "well, I don't really go to meetings that often". I really
urge you all to reconsider and actually get involved. Sure, I know a
bunch of us are busy, but the people who *do* participate also have
jobs, busy lives, families and suchlike, they are no different. With
this in mind, I would love to see our irregular visitors become
regular visitors, see more people doing talks, and see more people
actively engaging in discussions. Again, this is a community and we
*all* need to play a part.

We have a real opportunity to make our LUG kick arse, but if we don't
pull together and contribute, it will just toddle along and become a
fairly mediocre LUG with not an awful lot going on. But, to make this
happen, we *all* need to be responsible community members and play our
part. We are all free software people, and the reason why you have
free software on your computer is because in the face of busy lives
and other commitments, people made the effort to contribute. Lets see
this happen here. :)

  Jono



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