On 4/6/06, Jeff Waugh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <quote who="Philip Greggs"> > > > The rumour vines says this: intending members using other distros are > > discouraged altogether from becoming members. The President's report was > > making this plain and clear - declining membership in recent years. > > I don't think this is accurate at all. Membership has been declining due to > the change in demographic
Demography as I understand is a basket of things like Age, Sex, Race, Education, and similar categories. This can't be correlated to decline in SLUG membership. The link is very weak. How can it be responsible for the membership decline ? Perceptions are stronger links and have direct correlations to people decisions in deciding to become financial members of SLUG, I'd think. >and growing general popularity and relevance of > Linux, and SLUG's inability to demonstrate the value of membership (no diss, > it's hard to do) beyond 'support the organisation and community' (which is > why I am a member). > > SLUG has gone through many leanings when it comes to distributions. At one > point, it was a SuSE club. I imagine the Debian leaning has stuck for a long > time due to the community buy-in, the long-running Debian SIG, its general > popularity in Australia, local consultants and professionals using it, new > and popular derivatives strengthening the ecosystem and userbase, etc. > It's probably true that preferences for Linux Distro in SLUG varies but there is a concerted effort currently to promoting Debian/Ubuntu. Some would-be members percieved this as dis-incentives to their interest because they are not buying into this Debian/Ubuntu stunt. > But I do not agree that new members or contributors to the local community > have been turned away due to their choice of distro *excluding* Extreme examples are codefests in Wollongong in recent times. If you remember or check the Archives, it was announced only Debian installs will be done. >those who > were unable to receive help because other users of their distro are not well > represented in this community. That is certainly true, but not something we > can easily fix (for instance, I am not about to change distros to make sure > I can help other SLUG members, and I imagine that's true for everyone here, > and the same applies to browsers, email clients, desktop environments, etc). > They may not be able to help with your distro problems, but they can sure as > hell help with your Linux (and general FLOSS) problems. S*L*UG! > > This whole discussion is way more divisive than the "Well, this is how I'd > solve it in the distro I know, perhaps this will help you find out the right > solution in yours" answers that we occasionally get. Slightly less divisive > than the "DUH install [my distro]! lolz!", but annoyingly more verbose. ;-) > I do'nt think it is divisive. I am highlighting what many are avoiding to say in public but persistently say in private. > I think the thing to take out of this discussion is that it takes a lot of > work to build a community, and if you want to get a particular thing out of > your community, you need to contribute and work towards it. > Do you think people using other distros are not contributing ? PG -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
