OT: LUGs dying out

[der.hans]

Am 23. Jul, 2007 schwätzte Matt Graham so:

> On Monday 23 July 2007 15:28, after a long battle with technology, Shawn
> Badger wrote:
>> Based on what the article was saying it looks like PLUG is doing very
>> well and has stuck to what works. Most of the LUGs they talked to
>> have become more of a [Stammtisch?] type meeting and left it at
>> that. I personally like the presentations that are given at the
>> meetings.
>
> Presentations are good.  You just have to find someone to give them.

Yup, that's the hard part :).

> Not everybody can gin up a talk that will interest over 50% of the
> users, even given a week or 2 to prepare.  Presentations were held
> at ... about 1/3 of the GLLUG meetings.  Then again, Lansing's a lot
> smaller than Phoenix, and there were only about 8-15 people at each
> meeting.

Well, if 10-20% of the people at a meeting are willing to give a
presentation once in a while and we move to 100 regular attendees from 50
( we're not really at 50, but I'm going for the easy math ), then we
potentially double our pool of potential speakers.

If you consider getting presenters who don't normally attend, such as the
excellent NASA presentations, the fun MythBusters presentation, the great
resume writing presentation, the impromptu wireless bridge in a box
presentation ( wish he'd show up again ), then we can also consider that
the 80% who won't give a presentation might know someone who would...

In the end, PLUG should be bigger in a metro area the size of the Valley.
Even more so because of the amount of tech in the area and how much of
that tech uses and relies upon Free Software.

We don't have a marketing budget ( I bet the big commercial software
companies spend more marketing dollars per day than all of the worldwide
LUGs together have in our annual budgets ), so we generally rely upon word
of mouth and people stumbling upon us.

> Attendance figures for GLLUG may have been boosted by the pizza fund
> that paid for cheap pizza at most meetings.  And the summer "Brats,
> Beer, and BBQ" meetings held at people's houses or at the public parks
> (minus the beer).

Yeah, food helps. A bunch of us regularly go for food after the general
meetings. It's Stammtisch-like and it's a great opportunity to discuss the
evening's topics. That's open to everyone, so don't feel like you're
crashing the party if someone doesn't explicitly invite you.

>> They don't always pertain to something I am interested in,
>> but I have learned about alot of applications that I otherwise didn't
>> know about or how do something in that app.
>
> Yep.  Usually, one individual user only knows about 60% or less of the

We have a screen presentation coming up that should greatly expand on the
screen presentation I gave last year. I'm really looking forward to
learning several new things.

> features of an app.  For emacs, it's more like 30% [-:   And the
> subsets don't overlap *that* much beyond the basics.  So you can often
> learn things from other users.  (Like they say, every different user of
> a beta product discovers a different set of bugs.)

Yup. Sometimes the perspective is more important than the time in the
seat or overall knowledge.

ciao,

der.hans
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