open sc mtg notes

[Deepak Saxena]

(cc:ing steering as I know some read that more often :)

My takes on some of these, plus other ideas spread throughout below.
Really wish I could have been there. Sigh.  No more travel for a few
weeks though. I may get flamed for some of what I say, so flame 
shields are on high.

> can to continue to encourage others to have meetings in other parts of the
> Valley. We might hold one of the main meetings at new locations as they
> open up as a means of giving them more support. This goes against the
> rule of consistently having meetings at the same place/time, though
> :(. We'll have to decide this as a group as new meetings open up.

As I mentioned in the steering list, I'm going to try to get a separate
dev group going every month.  I need to think about how to run this 
b/c we already have a perl group and a php group in town, and I don't 
really want to cross into their turf.  I'd like this to focus specifically
on development ON linux.  So things like gtk, qt, kernel haxoring, 
autoconf, optimizing with gcc, kgdb, etc, etc. Not how to access a 
database with php or how to write cool java applets.  That's for the php 
and java(is there one in town?) groups to discuss.

> Hans will give Jim a list of places that he believes would host meetings
> for us. Jim will post that to the discuss list.

Cool.  I'd love to offer MV, but Hans has been to our offices and knows
how tiny they are. :(

> Paul and Carl are going to work working up a 10 year celebration. They're
> gonna try to get us someone who who has helped it come this far for a
> keynote speaker. Paul is interested in making it a one or two day seminar.

ALAN COX baby! :) A one day seminar is a big thing to go for. We need
some major corp. sponsors and really interesting topics. Let me know
how I can help.

> It was suggested to shorten the presentations some in order to give people
> more time to kibitz after the main presentation. Maybe even form SIGs
> after the main presentation. A couple of people thought that went well
> after the alternative architectures meeting, e.g. clusters around Monte
> Vista embedded and iPaqs.

This was one of my big things I wanted to bring up.  I suggested that
when we announce that meetings start @ 7pm, the presentation will start
by 7:15 AT THE LATEST.  I read slashot, lwn, linux.com, linux journal,
etc as the most people here and I think it's redundant to spend almost
one hour sometimes, discussing things that took place maybe three weeks
ago.  That's what this list is for IMHO. Something interesting is posted
on slashdot (that's rare these days), and we discuss it here. Don't get
me wrong, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have open discussions about
recent news at the meetings, but the main priority should be getting the 
presentation done. I propose that we restructure the meetings to be:

	1) "Hello", plug related announcements
   2) Presentation + q/a (limit this to 1:15 unless its like Alan Cox)
   3) Open announcements (php group, jobs, slashdot news, etc, etc)
   4) People hanging out/bsing/whatever till end time.

This way those of us that are extremely pressed for time can just show up, 
watch the presentation and head out.

OK, now some of the other things I wanted to bring up:

1) This topic keeps coming up every so often, but with us wanting
   to do a 1-2 day thing for the 10th aniversary, I think it might
   be time to revisit.  Non-profit status.  I think this would help
   us a lot as it would be easier to get companies to donate money
   which could be used for things like advertising, equipment, a
   dedicated high end server/connection, etc, etc.

2) Try to get more people from companies (in/out of town) to come
   talk.  

3) Focus on linux related topics for meetings.  We've gotten much
   better, but in the past we've had some topics which IMHO are not
   linux related (speedchoice pops to mind). It's a cool subject, yes,
   but let's focus on growing the linux community and knowledge base
   in the valley.



-- 
Deepak Saxena - deepak@csociety.purdue.edu - phone://602.790.0500

Code Monkey, MontaVista Software, Inc. - THE Embedded Linux Experts

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