[GLLUG] new location

[Charles Ulrich]

It was really great at first, but towards the end, Gone Wired became
less attractive. It's a lot busier year-round now, so it got to be
noisy and crowded. The prices on their beverages went up quite a bit,
and cheap pizza went out the window when they began selling expensive
pizza that took an eternity to make and didn't taste much better. But
mostly, it was because it got difficult to hold effective technical
presentations.

Gone Wired *was* an extremely good place to bring new people into the
fold for one very important reason. Because meetings were held in a
coffee shop, people could swing by and just observe at first. If you
show up and it turns out those Linux people are a bunch of freaks, you
can just sit in the corner and sip your coffee and slip out whenever
you want without being noticed. And it was just a relaxing place
overall. I believe we lost a large portion of our regular members
after we moved because they didn't want to have to sit in a meeting
room for a few more hours after being stuck in an office all day.

In a place like our current meeting space, there's always the fear of
the unknown. Once you walk through the door, you're pretty much
obligated to stick around for awhile and probably introduce yourself
and engage in conversation even if you're uncomfortable with the whole
situation. That's a big enough fear to a lot of people that even the
remote risk of this happening is enough to keep them from making the
time to drop by their first meeting.

It would be nice to get something that's midway between these two so
that we can have both the chit-chat style meetings and the technical
presentations at the same location. The closest thing to this that I
can think of is a hotel, but there's no way in hell to do that
affordably.

I know there was opposition to this in the past (I was part of it),
but maybe it's worth splitting up the meetings after all. The biggest
downside is that people are likely to forget which location has the
meeting this week, but maybe this can be mitigated somewhat if the
social meetings were on a different day of the week from the technical
meetings. So if a meeting fell on Wednesday, it was a social meeting
and a Thursday meeting meant that it would be a technical meeting. You
still have to pay attention to the calendar or mailing list at first,
but it's certainly better than hopping in the car every Thursday and
then having to think hard about which side of town the meeting is on
this week.

Charles

On Dec 2, 2007 12:21 PM, Andy Lee <ALEE at courts.mi.gov> wrote:
> It's been a long time since I've been at a meeting, partially due to schedule, and partially due to change of venue. What was wrong with Gone Wired? The location is nice, and the management seemed supportive of what we are doing. Since I hadn't been there in a while I may have missed something that pushed the move.
>
> >>> Clay Dowling <clay at lazarusid.com> 12/1/2007 8:12 PM >>>
>
> Eduardo Cesconetto wrote:
> > Last meeting we started discussing moving GLLUG to another location,
> > maybe closer to either downtown or MSU, there was suggestions about a
> > place above the Goodrich market on Trowbridge, or maybe somebody knows
> > someone @ MSU that can get us a place? Maybe Davenport? LCC? Anybody?
> > Bueler ? Bueler?
>
> I'm strongly opposed to having it at Davenport.  Our previous experience
> there suggests that it's completely inaccessible and nobody is entirely
> sure where to go.
>
> Clay
> --
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