[LUAU] Other LUGs...

[bbraun at sparcy.synack.net]

On Wednesday, Jan 1999 at 10:23:50 Chris Wong wrote: 
 | I'm thinking about who we are and what we provide...
 | 
 | I know we have several mainland people on the list... for those who are in
 | another LUG or have seen another LUG, I'm curious as to what they do.

 I've been to several different UG meetings, and each is different.
 Most try to provide some kind of tangible community service.  Meaning
 they maintain a piece of software, write documentation, write software,
 or some other form of service.

 Some collect money and try to send motivated students in the community
 to various conferences, or try to lure some fairly prominent person
 into talking at one of thier meetings or having a tutorial.
 All the groups that do anything involving money have thier little 
 positions of president, vp, executive director, chief luser, etc
 and rarly contribute anything to thier members.  Personally, I find
 these groups repulsive.

 The somewhat successful groups I've seen put on tutorials at the meetings,
 so they lure in business people that want to know about something, 
 and have some hobnob sessions surrounding the tutorials.  The most 
 important thing to keep in mind is that these are tutorials and real
 presentations, not just some guy blabing about what he's done.
 Many times these presentations evolve into papers that are presented
 at USENIX or LISA conferences.  These papers can be anything from 
 some useful perl script you've hacked up, to a sneaky and exceptionally
 useful way of using one or more existing programs.

 It seems that LUAU is fairly good at this type of thing.  Having presentations
 on how to solve a problem, or something interesting to you.  For example,
 Doug offered to talk about Oceanic's stuff, it sounds like there have
 been some presentations on IP Masq and RR.  A polished security lecture
 would be great as well.  Ed used to have demos of cool things from time
 to time, like AfterStep and that kind of thing.
 
 A lot of time, attendees have thier own agenda and what to talk to someone
 to figure out thier specific problem.  That is what the hobnob times
 surrounding the tutorial are for.  If the tutorial and social sections
 of the meeting are kept separate, this format can work very well.

 If there is an interesting presentation, it may be beneficial to post
 signs at CompUSA or something like that.  Doing the meetings and tutorials
 regularly is what keeps people coming and allows attendance to grow.
 It is much better to arbitrarily say there will be meetings 
 the first tuesday of every month, than to go from month to month trying
 to find a meeting time everyone can make.  Sometimes people will be able
 to make it, sometimes not.  It really does make the group stronger
 if meeting times are regular and well defined.
 Also, if you know someone that is coming to town and they seem knowledgable,
 get them to do a guest appearance at the meeting.  This is the spice that
 makes it fun.

 Just my random thoughts after hanging around various USENIX and IETF
 conferences, the Front Range Unix Users Group (fruug.org), and such.

 Rob