Hello all, As we turn the corner into a new year, I was thinking about the CWE- LUG and its future. As mentioned on the main webpage[1], the CWE- LUG's goals are to advocate, educate, support, and socialize around FLOSS regardless of operating system preference and regardless of skill level. That is, the CWE-LUG should be as inviting to newbies as it is to gurus whether they run Windows or Linux or BSD or Mac OS X or whatever. To meet those goals the CWE-LUG has a public mailing list (which is monitored), a website, and a semi-open wiki. It also holds monthly meetings which are free and open to the public and distributes FLOSS software via BitTorrent with the assistance of a local hosting company, Contegix[2].
Given that those are the goals and what the CWE-LUG does currently, I'd like to ask each of you a small favor. If you would, could you spend just a few minutes thinking about the CWE-LUG and send me your opinions on what you think the CWE-LUG could be doing better? That is, how can the CWE-LUG improve? For example, can we do better with the website and, if so, what and how? What about the mailing lists and the wiki? What do you think of the meeting date, time, structure, content? How can the meetings be improved, or are they fine as they are? Personally, I enjoy the meetings, especially recently in the library. Lots of space for machines, yet informal. The talks have been less like seminars and more like good discussions, which I prefer. But that's just my opinion. Do you have a differing opinion or similiar? One of the things I was thinking about was redesigning the webpage. Specifically, I was thinking of migrating it to a CMS like drupal, civicspace, mambo, or one of the others mentioned on Open Source CMS [3]. Several months ago Jerry Hubbard and I installed drupal, but that was just as a proof-of-concept and got wiped when I had to rebuild the machine. We could do that one again or something else. Considering I have negligible experience with web stuff, I'm open to any and all suggestions. What are your thoughts? Currently, M and I are working on the OpenVPN and we have successfully connected to it from outside the CWE-LUG's firewall. Please e-mail me directly if you do not want to e-mail the list, although I'd like to encourage the discussion to be as open as possible. Thanks in advance for your opinions. [1] http://cwelug.org/ [2] http://www.contegix.com/ [3] http://opensourcecms.com/ Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
