Meetings, MSU facilities, and membership

[Sean]

Andrew R Keen wrote:
<snippets>
> I'm NOT in favor of splintering GLLUG, but I think that it would be convenient
> to have a twin organization on campus for scheduling MSU facilities and PR
> purposes (SN, anyone?).

I agree, that there are some benefits of being associated with a college
be it msu or lcc. Student involvement, publicity, and money come to mind.

*throws out a wierd 3.30 am maybe more for the sake of argument than validity.*

Considering MSU student organizations consist of MSU students and the
sponsering faculty/staff person. The breaking up of the club into twins
would also imply that in a non-sensical way that the anyone belonging to
the non-msu portion would be all professional users, which it is far
from the case nor is it the clubs goal to be a professional organization
for (free-)Unix professionals. This implies that everyone in the non-msu
affiliated portion is both a professional user and has professional
level knowledge. We all are pretty much aware that this is not the case
and we want to keep it open to all-levels of users from the community. 

In my eyes, the goal of the club is really about education. Whether it
be a hardcore Linux user, a cross-over FreeBSD user, a new unix person,
or just someone who wants to learn about computers or even have it be a
social organization. The educational value of this organization varies
by level of user and the aggregated knowledge of this community. The
aggregation and disemination of the knowledge is the key concept. 
This in educational terms really falls under life-long education.

In order to tie in with the university, (if we really want or need the
affiliation,) would it be a plausible idea to create a life-long
education non-credit course?

This essentially gets around a lot of obstacles since technically we
would all be MSU students. We could have a small course fee, which would
be waived for guest lecturers who would be welcome to attend any of the
"classes", the classes would be a lecture series consisting of guest
lecturers. It could be expanded at a later date into several "series" of
classes focusing more intensely on different topics. These could include
intro-linux/bsd, Perl, PHP, Python, SQL, C, kernel hacking,
administration, security, etc  with or without some sort of
certification of class completion.

As a side-effect, it could nuture the growth of various "free"
technologies. Part of the problem with the adaptation of "free"
technologies is the lack of available instruction. I can goto LCC and
take a class on visual basic, where do I go to take a class on Perl?
This might kill two birds with one stone. First it would give a place
show people how to use various technologies, eliminating, the "I want to
learn it but no one teaches it. I'm going to stick with M$, I can learn
that at LCC".

It could also allow the development of a curriculum to be used by other
educational institutions, like schools, or LUG's. It would already be
semi-tested on real people.

The whole idea would also introduce several other problems and as I said
its just an idea.