perhaps we should do more like the coldfusion group and have one topic meeting a month (they only meet monthly)? and have the other meetings be general help meetings... and social meetings. an Idea. <div> On 8/22/06, Thomas Hruska <<a href="mailto:thruska@cubiclesoft.com">thruska@cubiclesoft.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Caleb Cushing wrote: > are we going to be maintaining the current schedule? are we going to be > attempting to have new presentations? maybe just not as hard? or are we > just > going to start having social meetings? Structure is a good thing to have.  Too much structure, however, is bad.   Having an agenda with topic nights is a good thing.  But having too many topic nights may be what hurts attendance for topic nights.  If the group turns into a "social gatherings only" group, attendance could go any direction.  Really, it is an issue of balance.  Free food is a pretty good incentive for most people. Also, the content should be relevant to what people in the group need. Take the firewall-based OSes topic night we recently had.  Sure it was interesting, but was it useful and relevant to what people _needed_? Probably not.  What might have been more useful would have been to walk through the steps to set up a firewall but open, say, port 80 and set up Apache.  Now, that's simple to do and someone here will tell me to search for 'ipchains howto' and 'apache howto' on Google, but my point is that the latter is more likely to be relevant to group members.  Or, take the "backups" night we just had.  Talking about backups is different from actually helping people set up their systems to do regular backups.  People are resistant to change - especially when things _seem_ to be fine as-is.  How many people here started doing regular backups as a result of the topic night discussion?  Answer: Maybe one person.  The rest of us mentally said, "backups are good." I'm not saying the presentation wasn't informative - it was.  It just wasn't interactive.  Well, it was sort of interactive, but it wasn't at the same time.  Does that make sense? The upcoming Linux Installfest should be followed by a few weeks of learning the basics of using their new Linux distro. and the preceding week with training.  This means fielding Q&A live and it also requires incredible restraint from old-timers who have the tendency to get frustrated with new users (you know who you are).  If the group is interested in having a pre-Installfest experience, I can pretend to be a new user (complete with an alternate personality).  I've got extensive usability testing experience and thus can drive you all up the wall to completely prepare you for the Installfest.  I'm confident everyone would find such a session incredibly informative. -- Thomas Hruska CubicleSoft President Ph: 517-803-4197 Safe C++ Design Principles (First Edition) Learn how to write memory leak-free, secure, portable, and user-friendly software. Learn more and view a sample chapter: <a href="http://www.CubicleSoft.com/SafeCPPDesign/">http://www.CubicleSoft.com/SafeCPPDesign/</a> </blockquote></div>