Great discussion so far. Here's my 2 cents: I haven't been out to meetings for some time in part because of the meeting location.
As John said, booking a new location is lots of work. When I served on the board I tried and failed to find a good alternate venue. Maybe it's worth revisiting the Code Factory as an option. At the time $5/head was too expensive but if the group is smaller it might be fine. We could suggest a $5 donation to cover the meeting room expense. I don't feel that helping the general public discover Linux is a significant concern. People that are considerign coming to a meeting will have already decided they are interested in Linux and want to know more. Even when those meetings are too technical for everyone to follow everything, it's still interesting to see cool things being done successfully with Linux. Being friendlier to newcomers is important though. Maybe we could explicitly invite people that are new and/or had trouble following the discussion to a table at the beer sig to answer questions and do introductions. I'm sure lots of us would be willing to be at that table. I think the board serves a real, useful purpose. There's work to do that won't just happen organically, like organizing speakers, venues and planning activities. Maybe if we can't find enough people to run reducing the number of seats makes sense. I recorded the slides and audio for a couple of Bart's talks a few years back. It worked well but it's not something I have time for right now. It also needs set-up (running vnc) on the computer doing the presentation. Cleaning up the audio afterwards is also big job, but makes questions from the audience much clearer. Ian _______________________________________________ Linux mailing list Linux@lists.oclug.on.ca http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux
