<quote who="Philip Greggs"> > > 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.
The demographic of Linux users is expanding and changing - that has an impact on every project, LUG, association and organisation in our little world. SLUG is no longer all-coders, it is no longer all-sysadmins. The entire 'market' *around* Free Software is maturing. That is what I mean by the change in demographic... We've known about this for a long time, too: http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2002/the-future-of-slug/ > 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. There's no concerted effort to promote Debian or Ubuntu. Debian has been very popular in SLUG (and Australia in general) for a long time, and the community of Debian developers and Debian users in SLUG have been actively helping and supporting themselves by creating events such as DebSIG. This tends to happen more effectively for community efforts, like Debian. Ubuntu only turned up on the scene in September, 2004. The local Debian community was already thriving at that point (which gave some of us the opportunity to get involved in Canonical at a very early stage). Making all of this fun and excitement sound like a conspiracy is pretty silly. :-) > > 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. I think that has more to do with policy and familiarity (particularly when it comes to local community support) than anything else. From memory, many of the SCLUG install fests have been associated with the University and its students. > I do'nt think it is divisive. I am highlighting what many are avoiding to > say in public but persistently say in private. Funny though, that saying it in private doesn't actually do anything towards solving the perceived problem. The fact that this thread inspired Del to at least *say* he was going to create a Fedora SIG is great. No one's going to fix the problem except the people who want it fixed - so please go bananas! > > 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 ? They are pretty obviously not contributing *to their own success* (which is the message in my paragraph above, and not one that should be misconstrued - purposefully or otherwise). - Jeff -- Desktop Linux Summit 2006 http://www.desktoplinuxsummit.org/ Push the envelope, or push the daisies. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
