[clug] The harsh realities of CLUG

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Well, this is coming from my perspective as someone who moved to
Canberra in February and then found out about CLUG in March.

Paul Wayper <paulway at mabula.net> writes:
> 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.

I have only come to 2 actual CLUG meetings (not counting PSIG) but I
haven't seen any such intimidation or bunch of know-it-alls.

Admittedly, if it wasn't that I lived near ANU and the meetings are held
there I probably wouldn't bother coming to CLUG; I never went to a
single HUMBUG meeting when I was in Brisbane since I was already at UQ 5
days a week and didn't want to spend an hour each way to go there on a
Saturday.

> 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.

Agreed (except for the Thunderbird bit).  I've used forums; they don't
really allow in-depth discussions or the branching nature that emails
do.

> 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.

I would wonder, is there any point?

I can see the argument for an RSS feed, maybe a Planet, but would having
a forum magically lead to hordes of new users?

> 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.

I wonder, what would you envisage the website containing?  Is
yet-another-linux-support forum necessary?

A couple of things I could see as being helpful; maybe a wiki would
help:

* A list of Canberra computer shops with comments as to service, price,
  Linux knowledgeability, etc.

* Links to related events (LCA, etc.), groups (both generic open-source
  and programming-specific) and organisations (linux.org.au, etc.).

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

Advertising; I didn't know it existed until someone on the #gentoo-au
IRC channel told me about it (especially to students in CS, etc. at
ANU).

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com