[NBLUG/talk] LUGs, venue, advocacy, dues/incorporation, and other thoughts

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Brad Morrison (bradmorrison at sonic.net):

> Rick: I also emailed the Pritchards from on July 16 and on July 18 I
> heard back from Steven. I will include you on my response to them, I
> just haven't gotten to it yet. I'll save all of that conversation
> for between the 4 of us and then we can report back here anything
> that might be particularly interesting or useful to the larger
> audience.

Great!  I hope the communication from both of us helps them a little,
rather than just piling work onto them.  (I certainly know from
experience that the problem with documentation for the Web is less
the time and effort to initially create it than the maintenance.)

> On a separate note, thank you for all of your work over the years
> maintaining LUGs and the various associated documentation! That's a
> lot of thankless tasks and even though I've just barely scratched
> the surface of what you have done, it is pretty cool to have you
> share your stories and knowledge with us.

Appreciate your kind words, sir.

Some good news about TLDP:  The guy now in charge good-naturedly
accepted my update to the Linux User Group HOWTO, checked the SGML into
GitHub, and in theory will propagate that out to the site HTML, some
time soon.

> Derek: social, technical, advocacy = sure, that makes sense. I
> assume that you have observed this about me already, but I do not
> have a computer science degree, nor nearly as much experience with
> technology as most of the NBLUG participants that I have met so far.
> So I can't keep up on the technical conversations, but it is still
> interesting to learn (sort of). I tend to be more interested in our
> discussions on various differences between Linux distros and package
> management systems and why some packages are capable of being
> updated more frequently than others based on which libraries a
> particular distro may ship with or whatever.

I'm still hoping to angle back to that thread, time permitting.

> Advocacy: I am more interested in this aspect, in large part because
> I can't contribute much to the technical development of open source
> software. Part of my advocacy work involves more communication about
> open source software, even if just to the NBLUG list. Even if we
> doubled attendance at the monthly meetings (to the mighty number of
> 15!), we would still only have a small fraction of the people on the
> NBLUG talk/announce email lists (236/454 people). 

You know, I suspect this is within expectation for the current state of
things, particularly at the height of the Omicron BA.5 surge.  

It's not even all the new a phenomenon.  Back when LUGs were at the
height of their historic popularity, around 2000, many of us noticed
that the LUGs' online communities were vastly larger than the group that
met in-person, and (at that time) we also observed that many of the more
vocal online participants literally never, or almost never, came to
in-person events, such that there was a near-disjoint _pair_ of sets of
active members, the in-real-life leaders and the mailing list crowd.

Also -- and it would take a long conversation to give examples -- the
experience with LUGs down here in Silicon Valley taught us that it's
wisest to allow LUG planning and governance be primarily in the hands of
the members who're willing to put in the time to meet interactively in
real time, rather than just do asynchronous e-mail discussions.  There's
something about interactivity plus time-investment that better grounds 
such discussions in realism and avoids getting lost down conversational
rabbit-holes, personal hobbyhorses/obsessions/peeves/vendettas, and
irrelevancies.  (I imagine that in 2022, having such interactivity via
Jitsi Meet, Zoom, etc. gives you almost all the same benefits as
meeting in-person around a table.)

> So at this point, it feels a bit like inside sales, rather than the
> community organization equivalent of cold calling - tabling at events. 

I _think_ I understand your point.  But, is that regrettable?

Please pardon while I tap my cane a bit as a LUG old-timer, and relate
some more history.

Going through the 1990s, we of course were all about public outreach
(along with having fun and scratching our own itches).  I was part of a 
group of San Francisco and Silicon Valley Linux people who not only ran
LUGs but also "installfests".  Those were held in a number of places, 
and the most prominent were at Saturday computing flea-markets held in
San Francisco, Oakland, and Pleasanton by the now-vanished Robert Austin
Computer Show company, who invited us to hold Linux-oriented events 
at a free-to-us set of vendor tables they gave us at their
"computer shows".  We knew that some substantial fraction of 6,000 or so
end-users would be dropping in at our tables on a given Saturday,
curious and asking "What's Linux?", so we made sure we had good answers,
eye-catching things to see and play with, literature to hand out, and
pre-burned distro CDRs to give out for free.

And then things changed.  It was obvious why and when.  Two things
happened:

Netscape Communications made the world-famous Mozilla announcement, that
their browser would be going open source on April 1, 1998.  (This got
hastily moved forward a day to March 31st, when lots of people told
Netscape that it'd be assumed an April Fool's joke.)  This wasn't
_directly_ about Linux (though Netscape had Linux releases), but because
Linux was the most-famous open source OS, it got Linux a lot of sudden
attention.  

Then the other shoe dropped a few months later:  Informix, the SQL
database firm, out of the blue announced imminent release of a full
Linux production kit.  This was _huge_, because all of the dozen-ish
major SQL database firms kept being pestered for years:  "When are you
going to release for Linux?"  Every one of them had a practiced
response, like:  "We have extensively studied this question, and
management has concluded that there is no market for a Linux version."  
This was, of course, absurd, because if you lined up everyone asking
"When are you going to release for Linux?", those alone were enough to
support a proprietary commercial database.  But now, Sept. 1998, one of
the majors had broken ranks.  Hilariously, Oracle Corporation panicked
and tried to break all possible spead record _beating_ Informix in
getting a suddenly-produced Linux version to customer hands, and then
within a week, every other proprietary SQL company other than Microsoft
(SQL Server) hastily coughed up competing Linux releases.

One of us-lot had the inspired idea (can't remember who did this) of
seeking out and getting a confidential remark from a member of the
technical staff at one of these big companies:

Q:  Was it difficult to do a Linux port?
A:  Difficult?  Hardly.  We've been running on Linux 
    internally for at least five years.  All we had to 
    do was type ./configure; make; make install, and 
    it worked perfectly.

We noticed the difference starting at the very next Robert Austin
Computer Show.  _Nobody_ visiting our tables needed to ask what
Linux is.  It was all over the magazines, and everyone knew.  Now,
the questions were all about _details_, of how to most effectively
make it work for them.  And the reality that Linux was now
_infrastructure_ and not any kind of utopian mad-science project started
to sink in with... everyone.

That was the week that we realised the work analogous to "cold calling"
simply wasn't necessary, any more.  We kept coming to Robert Austin
shows for a couple more years, but more for fun and out of habit than
out of any need.

The _descendant_ of our installfest events persist in 2022 as a
side-specialty of the Linux group CABAL, which meets 2nd Saturdays at my
house in West Menlo Park (north of Stanford U.)
http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/installfest/

There are of course always new people encountering Linux for the first
time, but the general nature of the conversation changed that month in
1998, and IMO needed to.

> Dues: I totally agree that it doesn't make sense for NBLUG to
> incorporate as a nonprofit or collect dues/donations, unless there
> was a very specific goal in mind.

I don't want to overly beat my own drum on this, but will mention just
once again that I've voiced my own views on this at
http://linuxmafia.com/lug/User-Group-HOWTO-7.html .

Experience suggests that among the disadvantages of collecting dues and
having a collective pot of (small) money is that there is a long-term
temptation for someone to fight (verbally) over that pot of money.  The
smaller the pot, the more vicious and destructive the fighting can
become.

Of course, LUGs inevitably end up having a thing or two that _somebody_
must fork out money for, if only domain renewals.  Some way to share the
pain is necessary.  I don't have any easy solutions to offer.

Experience also suggests that the urge to incorporate and/or to seek a formal
IRS determination letter granting recognition as a non-profit (or even
as a 501(c)(3) charity nonprofit) is _usually_ rooted in computerist
errors about what problem that solves and what problems are worth
solving.  Over the years, I've heard computer geeks justify those
efforts with erroneous claims about legal liability, about tort
lawsuits, about umbrella insurance, about the IRS and Franchise Tax
Board pursuing all of the group for income tax, about getting donations,
about qualifying for meeting space, and probably other inventions that
I'm not remembering off the top of my head.  

Computerists should, in general, not be trusted with tax and legal
planning for the same reason a programmer should not be trusted with a
screwdriver.  Yr. humble servant passed the nationwide CPA exam, used
to work as a tax preparer and staff accountant, and studied a
significant amount of law including tax law.  And I tried to pour 
my small fund of accumulated wisdom on that subject into section 7.1 of
the HOWTO's section about USA LUGs' organisational issues.


[NBEAA and the national EVA:]

> The national organization also provides the 501c3 nonprofit status to
> its local, affiliated chapters (as long as they follow some basic
> rules/bylaws)  

Yes, but... have you paused to figure out what tangible help the
umbrella group's 501(3)(c) charity recognition provides to NBEAA?

The one significant bit is that NBEAA can then correctly tell people "If
you donate money to NBEAA, you will be able to deduct that on your
income tax return as a charitable donation."  501(c)(3) groups are
extremely privileged in US tax law, in that way; those are the only
nonprofit groups where donations to them are _categorically_
tax-deductible.

Donations to other IRS-recognised _or_ non-IRS-recognised non-profits
_may_ be tax-deductible.  For almost 20 years, I was on the Board of
Directors of the local sysadmin guild, BayLISA, a 501(c)(6) non-profit
(incorporated) business league (guild).  If someone were to approach us
and say "Would my donation be tax-deductible?", our cautious answer
would be "Donations are tax-deductible as / if provided by law.  Consult
your tax advisor."  I.e., an IT firm, or other firm that hires system
administrators, donating money to a non-profit sysadmin guild can almost
certainly deduct that as a business expense, but we were not prepared to
guarantee that.

You might ask:  But wait, we need to be a recognised non-profit so that
IRS doesn't collect income tax from us if we collect dues or hold bake
sales or something.  But would they?  IRS (and FTB) in _theory_ collects
income tax on income in all of its forms, but in actuality, seriously
couldn't possibly care less collecting tax from about any group with
annual gross revenues less than $25,000.  Seriously.

And that's it for "501(3)(c) nonprofit status".

> IF there were a similar national/international organization of LUGs,
> then  I would highly encourage NBLUG to consider joining/affiliating.

The closest thing is that, occasionally over the decades, someone has
set up a mailing list as a forum for communication among LUG leaders
across (usually) North America.  If has a little chatter for a few
years, then it goes away.  Then someone else has that idea.  Lather,
rinse, repeat.

There are umbrella groups in several countries, e.g., Australia, Canada,
France, Italy.  Those are in fact noted in my HOWTO.  They seem in
general to be mostly clearinghouses for the public to look up where in
(e.g. Australia there is a LUG near them).