[clug] The harsh realities of CLUG

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 18 May 2010, Paul Wayper wrote:

> 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.

Hi Paul.  I don't live in Canberra but I've been on the list for a long 
time.  I've found the CLUG list to have some interesting topics and the 
members to be friendly and accomodating.

I actually think that LUG lists were more the above description years ago 
but have really tamed in the last few years.  Why this is I don't know but 
I suspect a general maturing of the user base explains it somewhat.  It is 
also possible that certain types of disruptive people are going where the 
majority are and ignoring mailing lists. I've seen the same phenomenon on 
Usenet and IRC - they are both much more pleasant places than say 10 years 
ago.

> 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

I think you hit the nail on the head in the last paragraph.  I prefer 
mailing lists to web forums.  I've pondered why this is.  I seriously 
asked myself whether it was just what I was used to but I concluded that 
wasn't it.  There are two principal advantages for mailing lists for me:

(1) All the information is in one place.  I don't need to go from forum to 
forum to see all the threads.  Granted RSS can help here as I could get 
notified of new threads but it is still more work for me to visit the 
sites.  I'm on dozens of lists which I can scan for new threads in a 
matter of seconds.  I couldn't manage this volume if I had to use forums. 
Which leads to...

(2) The interfaces for web forums are primitive in comparison to the way I 
read my email.  They have limited functionality and the functionality 
differs from site to site.  I can scan through threads in mail at least 5 
times faster than I can do it in a web forum.  I can thread the mail the 
way I like with one config option instead of having to find out how to do 
it on any given forum, assuming it is even possible.

FB & friends may be a good way to reach out to the wider Linux community 
but in terms of serious technical discussions I'll continue to favour 
mailing lists.

> 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...),

If you do, see if you can gateway it to the list.

> 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

The perennial problem of the volunteer organisation :)

> 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.

A wiki?  I really like wikis :)

Cheers,

Rob

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