[H-GEN] Room Bookings Update

[Bruce Campbell]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Paul Gearon wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Robert Brockway wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Paul Gearon wrote:
>>> While HUMBUG supports the latter two, I thought it was also a place
>>> for like-minded people to meet up, swap stories, expertise, etc. The
>>> danger in that is that it can alienate new people, so it has to be
>>> balanced.
>>
>> Hi Paul.  This thread is seeing a lot of names pop up :)
>
> Yeah, I'm just waiting for Raymond and Bruce to chime in.  :-)

Ding.  I'm in your mailz serverz, fixing up your queuez.

Now that we've had our humourous response to a random invocation, its time 
to address the thread as a whole.

Humbug has changed from what we started, 'back in the day'.  It was an 
accident of circumstances, and quickly grew to being that place you went 
to for help when your questions on unix-related subjects, or indeed nearly 
any computer subject, became too hard for your existing support people.

We cared for what we created, dedicating our time towards providing 
assistance to those who asked, or in some cases, those who needed to be 
told.  But over time, we moved onto other things, leaving our creation in 
the care of others.

What we, the founders, failed at was distilling what we really cared about 
into the new folk, ultimately resulting in repetitions of this thread, a 
veritable quibbling about snoozing, smelly feet and how things could, nay, 
ought to be better, if we could only choose the right way to go forward.

Sound familar?

       Sound...

                repetitive?

                                Fine.

                                                      Show me.

Show me that if you care about this group, you will do something for the 
group that isn't empty words.  Something tangible, something that lasts, 
something that is real.

Bring in speakers.  Adhere to a talk schedule.  Kick out the sleeping bum 
with the smelly feet (and grab my transceiver back).  Put up posters 
around the town.  Bring in fresh faces.  Make them feel welcome.  Break 
out of the cliques on a more frequent basis.

But whatever you choose, do something.  And once you have done something 
that is beneficial in whatever manner, don't be shy.  Tell us.  You might 
not have seen us at the meetings for the past few years (or more), but 
we're still watching to see how what we started comes along.  We're not 
keen on seeing it fail.

--==--
Bruce.

'You' is whoever is reading this, unless you're one of 'we' or 'us', in 
which case you're one of 'Them', those who are mentioned in the dim dark 
ancient history of the club.  At least until we got a room with decent 
lighting.