[H-GEN] Room Bookings Update

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Russell Stuart wrote:

>> For ten new members, do you want to deal with 99,990 problems with Firefox
>> on Windows that go nowhere, or 40 people who decide Ubuntu really is
>> too hard, and they're happy with their current system?
>
> Yes.

While the club is OSS focused it is a Unix club.  I hope no one is 
suggesting that we would actually make a habit of helping people out with 
MS-Windows problems, even when it concerns OSS applications.

Telling people about OSS - sure.
Holding "Linux/Unix for MS-Windows users" talks - sure.
Helping people solve problems on MS-Windows - no thanks.

> Yes.  They do seem interesting.  Do you have any suggestions
> for generating "regular talks on developments in
> Unix/Linux/free and open source software", because for the
> years I have been a member I have heard many.  If you can't
> get people to do such talks it ain't a great basis to run
> the club on.

Cities much smaller than Brisbane can manage to field a LUG with at least 
one speaker per month.  One city of 500,000 near where I live has 2-3 
talks at each monthly meeting.

If they can do it then we can do it.   I expect the lack of interest in 
doing talks at HUMBUG is due to the fact that it wasn't the club focus - 
it was more of an afterthought.

If we run dedicated meetings for talks then we will get speaker.

I was the Talks Maintainer for the Toronto Linux User Group for 4 years 
and I never had any problem finding speakers.  I had them booked months 
ahead.  AMost speakers approached me rather than the other way around.

> On the other hand, "come one and all, bring your computers,
> your open source chit-chat, and socialise with us" has been
> pretty successful till now at least.  The problems people
> bring to the meeting have always been part of that, and
> some people don't spending a few hours solving them.

True.  I think we should move to one traditional "fest" meeting and one 
talk meeting per month.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
I tried to change the world but they had a no-return policy