Website contributions (Was: Re: The site is down)

[Darrin Chandler]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 09:52:37PM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> 
> >As for the dog and pony shows known as East Side / West Side
> >meetings...that's been done for so many years that it's a somewhat tired
> >format that isn't going to draw a lot of people to them.
> 
> Well, then we need to fix them. The dog and pony shows in silicon valley
> have been going for longer than PLUG, but they still draw lots of people.
> 
> Also, I think it would be awesome if we were drawing people who "just want
> to use the computer" and don't want to be computer gurus.
> 
> We have awesome software to demo for just that audience: Firefox,
> OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, Blender, the GIMP, GAIM, PDF Creator, ...

I've noticed that there is little intersection in the groups attending
the East Side meeting and the Developers meeting. Now, the Dev meeting
isn't huge, but it draws about the same numbers as East Side.

I wonder how many people would show if there were a System
Administrators meeting?

While I think there's a place for apps like GIMP, Blender and such, and
probably a wide audience, you'll probably never see me at one of those
meetings.

You can have geographically-based meetings and try to draw the biggest
numbers (and turn off people with no interest) or have SIG-type
meetings. As you may guess, I would prefer SIG meetings. They would have
their own set of problems, of course. But I think SIGs would be a good
thing, and perhaps instead of 20 new users groups sprouting up we could
have a few SIGs (SA, Web dev, Noobs/Apps).

Just an idea, and probably not a new one here...

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |