Re: what do the LUGs do?

[Henry White <henryw@gte.net>]

Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 18 Jan 1999, Jim Jackson wrote:
<snip>
> > I suspect we ought to be doing some 'outreach' work and trying to
> > raise the Linux profile among local businesses and the general
> > public in our area.
> 
> Maybe we want to develop some promotional material together
> with all LUG people on this list?  Together we are much
> stronger (and wiser?). At least, that was the entire idea
> behind EULUG :)
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Rik -- If a Microsoft product fails, who do you sue?
> +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Linux memory management tour guide.             riel@nl.linux.org |
> | Scouting Vries cubscout leader.     http://www.nl.linux.org/~riel |
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> 
> -
> European Universities' Linux User Groups -- Action list
> http://humbolt.geo.uu.nl/eulug/



A very practical suggestion! Most of us have spoken informally about
Linux to someone we know or work with, but that's not always as
effective and efficient as a printed "spec sheet" - which *might* find
it's way into the hands of the people who make the decisions ;-) 

The individual LUGs could probably use some support, too. For example,
the Installfest portion that I snipped out above - there's no reason
each LUG should have to reinvent the wheel since it's been done before
many times, many places. Try to repeat what has worked for others and
adapt it to your local facilities and the capabilities of your
volunteers. I don't have a specific URL for either of them but there
were national installfests in Canada and France recently and we could
probably adapt some of their material - press releases, guidelines,
forms, etc. Another source is the LUGs who have installfests on a
regularly scheduled basis.

At the time Canada and France were making the headlines with their
national installfests, there were a lot of people excited about having
them around the world - even talk about the Linux community declaring an
'International Linux Day and Global Installfest' for the middle of
September 1999. Maybe people are working on that but I haven't heard any
more about it since late October. It seems a shame to let it fade into
oblivion - particularly after all the wonderful press coverage and media
attention Linux and Open Source have been getting lately.

BTW, if you haven't read the review of last year, I suggest you read 
http://lwn.net/timeline.html 
and check out the number of major players in hardware and software who
have already made a commitment to Linux and/or Open Source. 

Personally, I think the first responsibility of every user group should
be to it's own members; providing them with solid training and education
in the basics, so any and all of the members can install and configure
Linux on their machine as well as others. We should all be giving away
megabytes of GNU software and dozens of distributions every month. But
let's not forget that Linux is supposed to be fun, too! Just getting
together without computers, disks, etc., and enjoying a pizza and beer
together is nice ;-)

One pet peeve I have, though, is most of us spend hours putting together
a technical presentation - it's presented ONCE to OUR group then it ends
up in 
a file cabinet or trash, or maybe on our web pages. That's a terrible
waste, but I haven't come up with a solution. Some might be able to
travel to other LUGs and give that same presentation, but most of us are
not able to work it into our schedule. (In my case, I do my best writing
away from the computer, usually on legal pads at a coffee shop. Typing
and putting it into HTML would take 4 or 5 times as long as the actual
presentation.) It would be great if we could come up with some method of
preserving the work and spreading them around so more people could
benefit from them. Any ideas how to do that?  I tried some voice
recognition software and it was not satisfactory; and that is only plain
text format.

--
Henry White
mailto:henryw@gte.net

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