Introduction / Offer for help

Eric Eisenhart eric at eisenhart.com
Mon May 20 09:25:02 PDT 2002


On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 06:29:03PM -0700, nbs wrote:
> Hi there!  This is Bill Kendrick.  I'm with the Linux Users' Group of Davis,
> and am an SSU alumnus.  I've only ever been to one NBLUG meeting,
> a little over a year ago (to meet Bradley LaRonde of Agenda Computing),
> and I brought up a carload of others from the Davis/Sacramento area.

Yes, I recall that meeting.  I think that was just before our temporary
relocation out of O'Reilly.

I'm Eric Eisenhart; I've been "Vice-President" of NBLUG and I think I'm
currently the "President pro tempore".

> I just heard yesterday that NBLUG might be in need of help.
> (A friend who recently moved from Davis to Santa Rosa went to this month's
> NBLUG meeting - his first - and was in town yesterday...  I've always been
> a strong presense in LUGOD, and am always evangelising/advertising,
> which is probably why be brought it up.)
> 
> Anyway...  is there any way I or the rest of LUGOD can be of assistance
> somehow?

First, we've been too lazy to put up a web-based archive, but you can email
talk-archive-help at nblug.org and get some of the recent messages on this
topic to see where discussion has gone.

Dustin has been the NBLUG President since it was founded, and I've been the
"vice-president" for most of that time.  Basically Dustin runs things and I
remind him to run things, take over particular aspects, etc.  We also have a
"board" that helps out, a webmaster (Brad), etc.  I've also usually been the
"InstallFest coordinator" but that task has gone to others when I've been
unavailable that weekend.

Between O'Reilly and Sonoma State we've always had a place to meet.  For
several months last year O'Reilly was unavailable (they were in the process
of moving and our meeting spot was their staging area) so we met during that
time in a room at the SSU library.  We've moved the meetings back to
O'Reilly (in their new location) because it's closest to being our original
location, but we've kept the InstallFests at SSU because of better
bandwidth.

With the exception of a single meeting that we moved from Tuesday to
Wednesday to accomodate Tim O'Reilly talking to us, we've kept it as the
second tuesday of the month every month.  Sometimes it's not announced and
there's no topic, but people show up anyways and talk.

We've got the website and mailing lists (as well as some mirrors;
ftp://mirror.nblug.org/pub/mirror/, http://mirror.nblug.org/;
rsync://mirror.nblug.org/) on a co-located server of Dustin's that we'll be
able to use probably forever.  We might move to an easier to maintain format
for the website, and we might want to change mailing list software, but it's
all there and it all works right now.  (okay, the mirror is taking *forever*
to get RedHat 7.3, but the ISOs are there and I *think* you can actually
install by grabbing a floppy image or two and using the os dir; I think we
even have just enough for that i386, main-only mirror of Debian 3.0 that
I've been wanting)


We've had 2 ongoing problems for quite a while now:
1) being organized
2) getting speakers

Now, several of us have repeatedly demonstrated a capability of being
organized.  The basic problem is time and committment.  We're capable of
being organized, but not inherently very good at it, and we tend not to have
the time to be organized.  Or, at least not enough time left after working
our full-time jobs, having social lives and spending time recovering from
said jobs and social lives.  We manage to pull off being organized for brief
stints.  For instance, about 3 or 4 times a year we have an InstallFest and
for most of a week beforehand I manage to be organized.  I've even been
accused of being Anal retentive about the InstallFests because I show up
with lists, number (or letter) everybody, etc.  Suggestions on how to be
better organized might help, but really what we need is somebody who's
motivated enough to *do* it.

We've managed to get some interesting speakers, but mostly it seems to end
up being one of us.  Between Dustin, Brad, Frank and myself we're tired of
talking.  We'd talked amongst ourselves and somewhere we've got a list of
topics we think people would be interested in, and sometimes we get
suggestions about topics people want to hear about, but it's harder to find
people both qualified to and interested in talking about them; and to do so
consistently month to month.


So, can you help us be more organized?

Can you help us find speakers?
-- 
    Eric Eisenhart   Freedom is slavery.      http://eric.eisenhart.com/
 ^  ICQ#: 48217244   Ignorance is strength.   eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
/e\ Perl&SQL Coder   War is peace.            IRC Nicks: Falsch Freiheit
---                        -- George Orwell



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