[UFO Chicago] Chicago GLUG: information update

[Brian Sobolak]

Some interesting events coming up for the Chicago LUG downtown--Erlang,
MySQL hackers, etc. Forwarded from LUNI.

brian

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [LUNI] Chicago GLUG: information update
From:    "John Quigley" <jquigley at chicagolug.org>
Date:    Thu, August 24, 2006 11:07
To:      "LUNI List" <luni at luni.org>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey Everyone:

Hope this finds you all happy and in good spirits, and welcome back to
Chicago for all of the students who left town over summer.  The Chicago
GLUG had a resoundingly successful summer: we took part in, and helped
initiate, events such as the Anti-DRM protest, BarCamp and the
Hackathon.  We met all sorts of new people and generated a lot of
interest in the group.

Let's push strongly into the new year.  I want to galvanize our forces,
this fall, and really make the GLUG a well known organization in the
Chicago community.

Step 1: inform everyone of our meetings waaay ahead of time, so that
people can put the events on their personal calendars.  In that vein,
September meetings are slated to take place on the following dates:

   * 2006 September 09 @ 5p
   * 2006 September 23 @ 5p

See this thread for more:

http://www.chicagolug.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=683

These are going to be big meetings.  On the 9th, Tristan is going to be
making a presentation on the distributed computing Erlang language. John
Q will be continuing his presentation on how to write shellcodes.

I'm bringing in speakers for the 23rd meeting: Joe Born, lead developer
on the open source Neuros OSD, and Mark Matthews, a developer on the
MySQL project.

We're still seeking people interested in giving lightning talks.  If you
are interested, please email me!

Step 2: Get more people out to our physical meetings.  Our digital
community is growing rapidly, but we still have variable meeting
turn-outs.  This is largely my fault, for not performing proper
advertisement of meetings.  I'll take it upon myself to correct that
aspect of things, as mentioned above.

But, I also ask that each of you take 30 minutes a week to go into other
communities that you're a part of, and inform people about the GLUG.
Point the people at our digital resources: the wiki, forums and mailing
list are all good candidates.  Feel free to give people my direct
contact information, I'm pretty good at pulling people into the group =)

Step 3: Give to the community.  That means you!  We need a more diverse
set of speakers.  We need more people putting content up on our wiki. We
need more people helping out with administrative, advertisement and
general organizational tasks.  We want this to be a democratic
community, so please take some responsibility onto yourself - I can only
do so much.

I also need to do some delegation.  This will be an important function
of the September 9th meeting.  If you're interested in taking on a
'titled' role within the GLUG, please be sure to come to that meeting.
We're going to be discussing a restructuring and delegation of roles.
Ken did an incredible, a simply amazing job, on the website this summer.
  I'd like to nominate him the webmaster.  Please see this thread for
more, and add your thoughts:

http://www.chicagolug.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3154

  Step 4: Create more on-line technical discussion.  I think a good way
to facilitate this is to exploit the powers of mailman.  Hardly anyone
is subscribed or using our discussions list.  I ask that everyone please
become a subscriber:

http://chicagolug.org/lists/listinfo/discussions

At the end of the day, what will really attract people to us is the
quality of our technical output.  We are, after all, a technical
organization.  Now, that output can take the form of published documents
(on our wiki or otherwise) or published discussions.  Mailman provides a
wonderfully easy way to discuss things, and automatically archives
everything for easy web-based review.  A very powerful medium, and I
really think we should be leveraging this a lot more.

Those are my thoughts for now.  Let's strike up some discussion on the
points made in this email - I'll see you all on the forums and
discussions list!

I look forward to seeing everyone!

Regards,
John Quigley

email: jquigley at chicagolug.org
cell:  312.351.3671
home:  http://www.chicagolug.org/~jquigley/
-- 
Linux Users Of Northern Illinois - Technical Discussion
http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni



--
Brian Sobolak
http://www.planetshwoop.com/