On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 07:59:24AM -0700, Joseph Apuzzo wrote:
> I agree that we need by-laws first. Which would meen
> that we need a organizing committee. Since this is a
> fairly involved process, 30-60 miuntes after our
> monthly meeting would not be enough. Therefor after
> the committee ( aka anyone that wants to be on this )
> forms it will probably need to schedule a seprate
> meeting. Comments ?
Why not post your ideas to the mailing list? Then the committee is everyone
on the mailing list, which is what I consider the membership of MHVLUG. I
think that electing an first year leadership to address these issues with
the input and consensus of the membership would be the right way to do this.
Otherwise no one takes ownership of actually getting things done. :)
I do admit that part of this is a matter of trust. Officially sanction a
group of people to lead the LUG through the first year, and put a more solid
structure in place so that the LUG can exist in perpetuity. I'm hoping that
my efforts over the past 6 months have warranted that trust from everyone
here.
Just so you know, these are the people I would nominate for the positions I
laid out:
President: myself - I've been doing this so far unofficially, and would hope
the membership would like to keep me around doing this some more. :)
Vice President: Porkchop - Porkchop not only gave the first talk at the LUG,
but also has been absolutely key in organizing both install fests for
MHVLUG. He has also been helping out quite a bit with MHVLUG
infrastructure.
Treasurer: Mike Chase-Salerno - Mike has done a massive amount of work
behind the scenes, in helping find a location for the MHVLUG meetings, in
dealing with logistics of actually making the meetings run smoothly, and in
doing leg work for incorporating the LUG.
Publicist/Secretary: Gary Pagliaro - Gary has done a tremendous amount of
work in getting the word out for the organization. He took it upon himself
to create and distribute flyers all throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley, as
well as contact all the local media outlets in order to ensure that as many
people as possible knew about the LUG.
Web Master: Jim Doherty - Jim is another one of our presenters we've had
this year, and has constantly been hounding me for ways to help out. And he
is already in the process of taking over the Web Master responsibilities at
the moment so that MHVLUG can have more up to date information on the website.
These five officers (and I hope these five people), would go through all
the year 1 items that need to be done with the organization, include setting
up bylaws, doing incorporation, figuring out fund raising, all while leaning
very hard on the views of the membership for direction.
For instance, I wouldn't let MHVLUG take any monetary donations from anyone
until there was a clear policy for reporting and usage of those funds. The
only time we did raise any money was for the CD sales at the Install Fest.
Those went directly to Porkchop to offset his cost for maintaining
mhvlug.org on his personal colocated box. We raised $55 at the Install
Fest for this, which Porkchop and I agreed was sufficient for 6 months of
hosting.
Doing all the policy work now seems to just keep everything really
nebulous for months to come, and we turn into a "Policy Generating User
Group", instead of a Linux Users Group, which is what I think we all
actually care about. :)
> On another note, I think that we should have a
> Webmaster, but that we should also have a Web
> Committee that does the work on the Web Site. This way
> people that want to help out or gain web experiance
> have an opertunity ( I'm one ). Comments?
I 100% would like other people to step up and help with the website. The
Webmaster would be the leader of any such efforts, but this is not meant to
preclude anyone else from helping out. My hope is that it will encourage
other people helping, as they won't be blocked on me. :) I would like to
ensure that anyone that wants to participate in this process has the chance
to do so, but it still feels to me that there needs to be a person who would
coordinate these efforts.
The role of officers is not to exclude anyone from helping out with the LUG,
it is to distribute the various tasks that have been left more or less to me
for the past 6 months to a wider group of people. This prevents me from
being the single point of failure for the group, but at the same time gives
people focus about the right person to talk to about one issue or another.
-Sean
--
__________________________________________________________________
Sean Dague Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net Linux Users Group
http://dague.net http://mhvlug.org
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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