[clug] The harsh realities of CLUG

[Paul Wayper]

Hi all,

I happened to meet a couple of people who are experienced Linux users but
aren't regular CLUG attendees and are not on the CLUG list.  I asked them what
their opinions of the CLUG were, and (paraphrasing and coming through the
imperfect filter of my memory) they basically said that their experience of
the CLUG was of an intimidating bunch of know-it-alls with a whole motherboard
of chips on their shoulder and an intolerance to anyone who broke the
unwritten and arbitrary rules of the list.

Now, I like email lists as a way to have conversations and keep a group
together.  I like pressing one button in Thunderbird and getting all the
conversations, rather than having to click around on web forums.  And
generally I think that the list is reasonably tolerant of new people and
questions, it doesn't get too heated too often, and we get a good range of
people and opinions on it.  I haven't seen the offence that drove one of them
off the list so I suspect it was from before my time in Canberra, and I
explained the other as a misunderstanding about personal convictions.

But I think we can probably open our horizons a little to add some other forms
of modern internet social interaction.  I don't have a Facebook account, which
shows my opinion of it, but I'm open to someone starting a Facebook group for
the CLUG.  I'm also open to setting up a web forum on clug.anu.edu.au (which
we had somewhere, where's it gone...), although I don't have time to admin
that as well.  LinkedIn groups, twitter, rss feeds, etc. - there's plenty of
things there we can explore.

One problem (as I comment above) is that I don't have time to do all that.
Judging from the resonant silence when I ask for volunteers to help with the
meetings - not do all the work, just help - I get the feeling that there are a
lot of people even on the list or who come to meetings who are expecting
everyone else to do the work for them.  The best thing I can do about that is
to try to inspire people to help, but I'm no longer sure I'm doing this.  Tell
me what I'm doing wrong and I'll fix it if I can.

The other problem I see is that at the moment the CLUG website is a very fixed
format based on very fixed ideas of how what should be there.  It makes it
very difficult to add anything that looks like we're vaguely up to date.  My
plan here is to try to get all the people who have control over
clug.anu.edu.au and clug.org.au (which includes me, somewhere) together in a
room to hack together a way several people can update the site without too
much pain.  Then we can get some progress on keeping the site up to date.

Any other thoughts on ways we can improve the CLUG group and make it more
accessible to people are welcome!

Have fun,

Paul