On 05/07/2010 05:03 PM, Benjamin Scott wrote: > I'm told that in some other LUGs, it's the norm to just gather to > help each other and network (people networking, not computer > networking).
Check out the DLSLUG-announce archives. Last few months: November: Keysigning Party (I did the prezo, coordinated) December: Doug McIlroy talk (Doug volunteered) January: Social Meeting @ Salt Hill (I made reservations) February: Unmeeting (by suggestion, totally free-form) March: Awesome (James Murdza whipped up a demo) April: OpenHatch (Parker Phinney reported on his internship) May: Movie Night (Kurth Bemis sent me a "hey, this would be good", Arc Riley sent playback advice) Only one of those required serious planning on my part. Usually, if there's not a speaker, we'll do a Nifties!, which is audience participation night. 5-10 minute mini-demos from the crowd. Somebody set up a machine on the projector. Just marginally more structured than an unmeeting, but often with delightful results. The important thing is consistency. People drop in without checking the -announce list, if they know they can count on it. The few times I've done a hard-cancel I've always received negative feedback. This aspect holds true for any community with regular meetings, nothing LUG-specific. At the last meeting I had a member show up for dinner but not be able to find the meeting afterwards because we got assigned a different room - the beer notwithstanding, he hadn't bothered to look at the announcement 'cause he didn't feel the need to. If we listened to maddog's advice (the allegory of the Scoutmaster in the rocking chair) we'd delegate the speaker, facility, communications, etc. tasks effectively and make that nobody-has-any-time problem into an everybody-has-five-minutes problem. -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner BFC Computing, LLC http://bfccomputing.com/ Telephone: +1.603.448.4440 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
