My two cents ... Some guy wrote: > I think the point I'm trying to get at is how do we get people to > participate physically. The mailing list is doing great (we're actually > down in flame wars for the last few months) but trying to do things > outside of the list is difficult. If we have 50 people show up to install > and only 4 show up to help out, that could be a problem. :-)
A couple of questions: What is the "point" of the UUG, in your (and in others') eyes? For example, to me, it's been a bunch of people who enjoy playing around with Unix-based systems [the fact that I'd like to include MacOS X/BSD/etc. users in the group is I think the biggest argument against changing the group's name, but I guess I (fortunately) missed /that/ flamefest] who have meetings and talk about cool, nerdy unix-y stuff and occasionally we have fun activities, be it a barbecue or an install-fest or whatever. Historically I was never really a "core" member, but I came to a lot of meetings when I could, and when I had a car I went to other off-campus activities as well. That leads me to the next question: are we having a "problem" with any of these goals? Are not very many people coming to meetings? Are not very many people coming to the "fun" activities? Are not many people wanting to help out with an install-fest booth? I've only been back a couple of weeks, but it seems the only serious problem is with the last one, and that seems to be because everybody is busy with school/work (that's my only excuse, and I'm contemplating skipping school/work to help out for an hour if things get serious enough). Finally, /is/ it a "bad" thing if we have 50 people show up to the install-fest and only 4 UUG members there to help out? And, seriously, judging from the past (I can't remember if I ever actually went to an install-fest, so I don't know) is this a real danger? It seems to me we'd be in more danger of a dozen UUG member showing up and there being little for them to do. After all, most installs are two minutes of configuration, a half hour of waiting, and a few more minutes of trouble-shooting. We don't need an army of enthusiastic penguin-suit-wearers to coerce the masses into joining the Open Source Cult, if you get my meaning. I feel that if we have two or three UUG members interested in helping, and a dozen or two people interested in getting Linux installed on their computers, then that's not a terrible thing. At worst it means there's not very much interest at the moment, and at best it means everybody's currently busy with other things. Summary ------- I guess what I'm trying to say is: 1, there may be a lot of interest in the booth/installfest, but everyone's too busy, and 2, even if it _is_ the case that there's not a lot of interest in the booth, I don't see that correlating with "the future of club meetings/activities" (unless you've been seeing a definite decline which I have totally missed out on since I haven't been around). And finally, 3, even if there is minimal interest in/people with time available for the installfest, I see no reason we can't do a scaled-down version with only a few people. So, in answer to your questions: >To see if there is enough interest for this semester's booth/installfest I think it's an issue of "how much interest is there?" not an issue of "if we don't have lots of people there then it's not worth doing", unless, of course, you feel that it isn't, which is another discussion altogether. >To see if we should continue having booths/installfests See above. Unless I'm missing something very vital about booths/installfests, if there's even minimal interest it seems worth it to me to have one. >To think of how we can get younger members to get more involved in >coming to meetings/activities Again, is this actually a problem? It doesn't, at any rate, seem correlated to the installfest issue. Wow, my 0.02USD turned out to be a full ten cent rant. Sorry about that, folks. ~ ross ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
