[GLLUG] Meeting Thursday, August 24

[Thomas Hruska]

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)
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portable, and user-friendly software.

Learn more and view a sample chapter:
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