Simon Batistoni wrote: > > If they're irrelevant I'll save time and space by not bothering to answer. > I don't feel that these questions, or the addenda provided by MBM are > in the least bit irrelevant, and I would tend towards reading alex's > title as unnecessarily self-depracating. > > As a potential leader of London.pm, I would have hoped that you would > apply a similar lenient reading to such postings, and do your best to > accommodate the questioner.
Well pardon me for attempting to have a sense of humour. On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 11:13:01PM +0000, Lusercop wrote: > On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 10:57:00PM +0000, alex wrote: > > [a] What, in your eyes, is the worst thing that london.pm has ever done? > (i) why? Individuals have done some pretty silly things, and I'm no doubt just as guilty as anyone else. As a group though, I'd say that sponsoring the camel for the second time has to be up there. We couldn't afford it, and shouldn't have taken loans from members - who have had to wait far too long to be repayed - to do it. If we couldn't raise the money to do it properly, then we shouldn't have done it at all. It might have been OK if we'd gained anything from so doing, but I don't think we did, sponsoring a camel seems to me to have been nothing more than a bit of collective ego-boosting. There's nowt wrong with ego-boosting per se, but when it's done at someone elses expense it's bad, mmm'kay? > > [b] What, if anything, would you have done to stop them from carrying > > out this heinous act, if you were leader? It should be noted that at the time I think I was in favour, it is only subsequent events - namely our spectacular failure to raise the funds in a timely fashion - that changed my mind. There's nothing a leader can do to prevent any subset of london.pm from doing anything they want. However, I would hope that by asking people to not credit such schemes to london.pm my own special brand of sanity* might prevail. > > [c] What are your leaderly plans for penderel (the computer)? None. It works, so I have little inclination to fix it. > (i) who will have root? Same as now. If the sysadmins think someone else should get it for whatever reason, I'm sure they'll do it. > (ii) how will you go about making sure that people who aren't > supposed to don't have root? I won't, as I don't have root and I don't think I need it. You volunteering? In the grand scheme of things, penderel isn't actually that important. It's nice to have, and I'm grateful to those who look after it, but I won't lose any sleep over failures. So it runs our web site and the mailing list. Big deal, it's not like we're making megabucks from online sales, so the odd bit of downtime doesn't matter. And when was the last time it was rooted? Recent failures have been hardware and the network, not ev1l skr1p7 k1dd13z. > [d] What is the best thing that london.pm has done, and what will you do > to try and make sure that it, or something similar happens again? YAPC::Europe arose from a conversation on this list, before being taken off and implemented by a smaller cabal, so does that count? But I don't think we need to do something similar again, let's do something new instead. London.pm is too large and too damned difficult to orgynise for london.pm to do such things. It has proven to be a good source of ideas for projects which are then implemented by individual members or by small groups - YAPC::E being just the most visible such. The best way of ensuring that we continue to talk about mad crazy schemes like that is to make sure we keep having lively, well-informed, and friendly discussions on-list and on irc. The role of a leader in that is to make sure things don't get too nasty when the inevitable disagreements show up. Thankfully, we're pretty much self- regulating so I don't think that'll require much effort. > [e] How will you try and attract more new faces to london.pm, so that it > doesn't just become the same old clique? It's a pity that there's so little active crossover between us and other geekly london groups. I'd like to try to fix that. One solution might be joint tech meets. * - insert "mwuhahahahaha" as appropriate -- David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david It doesn't matter to me if someone else's computer is faster because I know my system could smash theirs flat if it fell over on it. -- (with apologies to Brian Chase)
