[NBLUG/Announce] State of the LUG 2015

[Allan Cecil]

Greetings,

As President of the North Bay Linux User's Group, I would like to take an
opportunity to send out a State of the LUG update for 2015, covering calendar
year 2014 (you can find the 2014 update covering calendar year 2013 in the
archives).  The goal of this E-Mail is to update all members about our current
status in all areas of importance and to encourage further discussion about
the future of NBLUG in the Talk list.  Here are some TL;DR numerical
highlights about the state of NBLUG as of 2015-04-03 compared to the last
update:

463 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Announce list (+3)
261 E-Mail addresses are subscribed to the NBLUG Talk list (-12)
205 Talk list E-Mails (in 53 conversations) were sent in 2014 (-231)
On average, 14 members attend each meeting as of 2015 (+2)
6 of 6 board seats are filled through November 2015
http://nblug.org has been migrated to a new CMS (Pelican) 
~12 people are in the #nblug Freenode IRC channel at any given time (+2)
$145.73 is in the NBLUG cashbox secured by our treasurer (unchanged)

Important information: Please contact us at speakers at nblug.org if you know of
someone who would be willing to present on a Linux or open-source related
topic (more details below).  NBLUG general meetings are held on the 2nd
Tuesday of every month at 7:00 in O'Reilly's Tarsier meeting room at 1005
Gravenstein HW N. in Sebastopol, CA.  O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com)
additionally sponsors NBLUG by providing two raffle books at each meeting for
attendees as well as a free book of of a speaker's choice if they request one.
Sonic.net (http://sonic.net) sponsors NBLUG by hosting our racked
http://nblug.org server in their Santa Rosa datacenter.  On behalf of the
board, I would like to publicly thank our sponsors for their continued support
which enables us to operate without ongoing membership dues or donation
drives.


Mailing lists: Our mailing lists have remained fairly static for the last
year, with around 463 people subscribed to the Announce list (at
http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce) and around 261 people subscribed
to the Talk list (at http://nblug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk).  Talk volume is
down from last year, with 205 posts in 53 threads in 2014.

General meetings: Attendance at the monthly general meetings has stayed the
same or increased slightly since last year, averaging around 14 people per
meeting with some meetings with poular topics or outside speakers getting into
the 30-40 range.  I should note that the number I've presented here is a bit
higher than what's in the logbook, because the actual logbook entries are
typically 2-3 people short of the number of people physically present based on
my personal headcount.  While we encourage everyone to show up early and write
their names in the logbook to be eligible for the monthly book raffles it is
not uncommon for a fair number of people to bypass signing in (which is
potentially influenced by the security-minded nature of our membership, to
whom I would encourage signing in with an X instead).

NBLUG Board: The current board as elected during the November 2014 general
meeting consists of Allan Cecil (President), E. Frank Ball III
(Vice-President), Glenn Kerbein (Scribe), Matt Da Silva (Treasurer), Tom Most
(Board Member at Large), and John Morio Sakaguchi (Board Member at Large).
Our next scheduled elections will be during the November 2015 meetings, where
all 6 seats will be open for nominations (all board members serve 1-year
terms).  Glenn has indicated that he will not be seeking re-election as
Scribe (all other board members have not indicated whether they would or would
not seek nominations).

NBLUG website: The official NBLUG website at http://nblug.org has been
substantially overhauled over the last year by Tom Most with many articles
migrated by Glenn and a few changes made by NBLUG member Zack Gold.  The new
web site is entirely static, generated by a tool called Pelican (the same tool
used by http://kernel.org).  The motivation for that choice was to make
maintenance easier, since anyone who knows HTML and CSS could figure out how
to tweak things pretty quickly, but the other advantage is that there's no
security attack surface aside from Apache and SSH.  The site is now impossible
to spam, unlike Drupal.
There are a few unresolved, albeit minor, issues.  We have not yet set up
forwarding the old NBLUG mirror folder at http://mirror.nblug.org/ to point to
Sonic's mirrors at http://mirrors.sonic.net/.  Many old meeting notes are
unlinked; while they exist on the server, they are impossible (literally) to
find, but given that the sands of time have made most of these updates
irrelevant they are of less concern.  If this is an area you'd like to see
improved and you're willing to lend a hand, please let us know.  Overall
traffic is similar to last year, with an average of 360 hits a day.  I have
full statistics generated with goaccess I can share on request.

IRC channel: NBLUG has an IRC channel at #nblug on the Freenode network
(chat.freenode.net).  Activity has if anything incrased since 2014, with a
dozen logins and conversation most days of the week happening at various
points.  It should be noted that these statistics are somewhat anecdotal in
the absence of reliable logs; at one point a webpage of statistics existed but
it has not been reliably keeping track.  Also, our beloved bot, Erratica,
seems to have gone AWOL again, and the channel has been a bit more quiet (and,
might I say, less erratic) without her.

Cash balance: The NBLUG cashbox contains exactly $145.73 as of November of
2014 when the balance was confirmed by our Treasurer and holder of the
cashbox, Matt Da Silva, around the time of the elections.  There have been no
new expenditures in recent months (or years).  Because O'Reilly generously
sponsors NBLUG by providing us with a room to meet in and Sonic.net provides
hosting for our website our expenditures are effectively non-existant.  There
are currently no expenditures the board can foresee in the near future and
thus we are not currently seeking donations, although the projector we use now
is standard definition VGA only at 800x600 resolution and we would not turn
down a newer projector if one came our way.
 
Speakers: At the time of the previous State of the LUG, the last time a talk
had been given by a non-member of NBLUG was on 2013-07-09 by Alison Chaiken,
who was also the previous non-member speaker on 2011-09-13, and the last talk
given by a non-member not named Alison was 2011-03-08 by Same Bowne.  Over the
past several months we've been fortunate to have a couple of talks from
outside of the group from people not named Alison.  To help this trend
continue, please let us know about potential speakers at speakers at nblug.org
and we will promptly follow up with them.

Additional opinion and analysis:  I, Allan, feel that the evidence above
points to a viable, albeit somewhat stagnant, user group.  Our best attendance
occurs when we have outside speakrs, so for the second year in a row my one of
my primary goals is to work with the board to seek out speakers who can
present on topics that would interest you, the members of NBLUG.  While the
board actively pursues this goal independently, I feel the best resource we
have to connect with potential speakers is likely our members themselves.

I encourage everyone to share their thoughts about this State of the LUG
update on the talk list and I look forward to a lively discussion.  Thanks,

Allan Cecil
President, North Bay Linux User's Group

A.C.
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