Jamie Honan wrote: > Michael Nordstr�m <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> came by. Michael is associated > with a group in the south of Sweden / North Denmark. They probably > have a base of about 3,000,000 people. They have 4,900 members! And we will be 5000 in a few days... > Michael told me a little how they operate. It costs nothing to become > a member, you sign up webly. Actually, you sign up by subscribing to our announce list (low traffic), and after that you can post to any list. We have 27 different lists at the moment, everything from technical issues to game discussions. We also have a few internal lists used by us in the admin group, so we can discuss different issues in a more private way. We use mail/news and the web for more or less everything. One of our lists is e.g. used to create press releases. Someone post a draft version and everyone is then free to help out improving the press release before it is sent out. Read access is available for everyone (even if you are not a member), but to post to a list you must be a member. > They have meetings, but about 30-40 on the Danish side turn up, > less on the Swedish side. They might be twice (or three times) as many on the Danish side today (I have only attended the meetings on the Swedish side for the last 6 months or so --- so much to do, so little time:) However, we have 2 meetings on the Danish side and 1 meeting on the Swedish side every month and also 4 bigger meetings every year, where we discuss more 'strategic' issues. > This is where I got the idea that I was discussing with Kevin > Waterson about multiple mail lists. Using multiple lists becomes a necessity when you reach a certain size. When you get more than 200 messages a day it starts to alienate users ;-) Our primary technical list still has a quite high traffic (sometimes 50 messages/day), but it is still an improvement over how it was when we only had one list. Anyone finding the traffic too high can always read it using our news server instead. > We are missing out on providing a service. LUV, for example, has a > very active gamers list. Providing services of any kind is a very good idea. We have a calendar for different events in the area (not only events arranged by our LUG, but also events arranged by other LUG's). The software behind this calendar (http://www.adict.net/ ) is written by one of our members. Three Danish members (one of them our LUG President:) have written a Danish book about Linux covering everything from installation to administration. It is released under the OpenContent License (http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml) and apart from being available for download from our server it has also been released in paper format by a Danish publisher. We also arrange conferences now and then and participate in public debates over issues like allowing software patents in Europe (which we oppose). We encourage all our members to take an active part in the Linux Community, e.g. by participating in different projects. Myself and one of our Danish members are country managers for Sweden and Denmark in the Linux Counter project. For a long time we also distributed free CDs with Linux distributions (mostly Red Hat), but we have stopped doing that now since it seems like you can't buy a computer magazine these days without it including a CD with Linux ;-) A couple of years ago when we were more or less the only LUG in Denmark, our President and a few other members went on a "Road Show" in Denmark helping smaller groups of Linux users to get started with creating a LUG in their area (one of these LUG's now have more than 500 members!). The size of Sweden made it non-practical for a similar "Road Show" and it wasn't really necessary, since there already existed quite a few LUG's in Sweden at that time. Power to the penguins, /Mike _________________________________________________________ En adress f�r livet registrerar du p� http://www.home.se/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in the text
