[GLLUG] Meeting Thursday, August 24

[Caleb Cushing]

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.

On 8/22/06, Thomas Hruska <thruska at cubiclesoft.com> wrote:
>
> 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:
> http://www.CubicleSoft.com/SafeCPPDesign/
>
>
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