MorLUG status?
Joseph Yaworski (JY)
etc, but is anyone proposing meetings or anything of the sort? It's
sad to see it die.
Eli Heady
Yes! Are any morlug organizers still around? I'd love to participate in a local lug. Should we just set a time and place and see who shows up?
-eli
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JP Fielding
Michael Bond
I'd like to see it not die as well, but don't have the time or inclination to try again. I've tried to get enough interest back several times. Once independently with community people and once as a student organization (of which i was the faculty advisor). We tend to have success for several months worth of meetings and then things fall apart, because of a lack of interesting meeting topics and events. The same people get tired of presenting topics, and most people won't show up for general hack sessions.
There are a lot of things to over come. If people are truly interested the summer would be a good time to organize, plan a years worth of events and then push to get meetings going on a regular basis in august. I think there would be enough interest in the group, if the group could be done well. Biggest issues that we've had in the past:
1) Place to meet. Its difficult to find a location that is easy for everyone to get to. The idea behind the student organization is that it would eliminate that problem (and it did), but i think it also scared away some potential members. We've also tried the Blue Moose, but at one point they had changed their policies on allowing groups to meet. Scott's Run Settlement house was also tried. We traded web development work for a place to meet, but that turned into a bad arrangement.
2) Topics. Its easy to get a couple good topics going, but in the end people have to be interested in those topics. GPG is a good topic, but if no one actually wants to use GPG in their daily lives no one will care. Same with virtualization, installation, Apache, etc ... Those are all "niche" topics that won't draw most of your members to most of the meetings. In the end you typically have a handful of your members show up, and they are never the same from time to time. Which causes of the problem of always having to meet new people and not becoming familiar enough with anyone that you enjoy going just to hang out.
3) Tech support. Frequently in the past it turned into easy-to-find tech support. that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but very frequently that was the only topic on the list and the questions were simple enough that simple googling would show the answer as the first result. This discourages some of the members into not wanting to participate in the list because they are tired of answering those questions.
I think 1 thing that might help would be a group project. But, its hard to decide on a project for the group to work on.
The best run that MorLUG had was the first time through, but i think a lot of that had to do with a lot of the people already knowing each other from various places.
Michael Bond
mb...@the-forgotten.org
Joseph A. Yaworski
For a meeting place, I don't have any solutions to offer there. Maybe we
could ask the city.
For topics, we should brainstorm a few that have applications in the
current markets.
For tech support, we could always do the classic installfests for new
distros, et al.
As for a group project, it's hard to say what it would even be. We could
have a hackfest on an OSS project, but I'm not sure about interest in
that. That's what we're going to do in the FSG at the university.
Speaking of that, I'll see what I can do to get FSG and MorLUG to do
joint events on some things. That might rekindle some interest.
Michael Bond
Joseph A. Yaworski
I'm a bit loathe to take it over, because I don't want it to become a
student event. I want it to be a community event. If the FSG takes it
over, it might discourage non-university participation.