[Luna] The Future of LUNA

[Deborah Lee Soltesz]

>At 09:21 PM 10/23/2006, Patrick wrote:

>Forgive me for being snarky, but how many USGS employees, "people"
>attended when it was at Bookman's? I can remember Ernest for sure who
>was a pop-in from time to time, but that's it.

I love snarky. Hmmmm As I recall, when it was at Bookman's, I'd see posts a 
few minutes before a meeting that said "Uh, are we meeting tonight or 
what?" -- no, I wasn't going to skip my afternoon off (or leave work hours 
early, as the case may have been) to go to the wrong side of town (I live 
on the far east side) to a meeting that might not exist. That was my 
motivation for pushing so hard for a meeting schedule I could set a cronjob 
by.

>I have met people that I would never have
>crossed paths with due to this group. The networking available to
>someone interested in Linux is powerful.

This is exactly my point Patrick -- in LUNA's current incarnation, this 
isn't happening, and this was one of the several motivations some of the 
USGS folks had for getting involved. When most of the meetings I've been at 
over the last several months have been attended by maybe four or five 
people, and only one or two of those is *not* a USGS person (hell, at least 
once, it was just the USGS folks), something's not working, and it's 
certainly not a scenario where we're going to meet new folks, new friends, 
network, etc. In the current scenario, the networking's not powerful at 
all, it's non-existent. Yes, I've met a handful of really great folks, but 
I haven't seen any of you for months.

Ernest's hope in providing a new location when Bookman's became a problem 
was to inject new energy into the group, help it grow, and turn the focus 
to computing instead of just socializing. Our intent was not to take over 
the group, just to provide the resources of our facility as a venue for 
meetings, presentations, activities, etc. Unfortunately, the lack of 
participation is causing the whole thing to crash.

In my opinion, the "old timers" (which doesn't include me - I'm one of 
those pop-in lurkers, and *gasp* an out of the closet Windows user to boot) 
are the ones who carry the most weight -- I encouraged this discussion to 
go out to the general list to make sure you, Curtis, and the rest would be 
involved. It's your group, you formed it, you're the ones who kept it going 
all these years. Either the group can try to be an active LUG, or it can be 
an intermittent social club at the local coffee house with an InstallFest 
once in a blue moon attended by two folks who aren't already LUNA members. 
If folks want it to be active, that means more than one or two people need 
to pitch in and provide support for activities.

I've already blown my wad, skipping my afternoon off once a month to be 
available for meetings (missing an afternoon hike to stay at work late puts 
me in major karma debt with hubbie), trying to get an InstallFest in the 
works, trying to keep regular meetings going after Ernest left, and trying 
to come up with new ideas for energizing the group. If it hadn't been for 
Kyle's energy, I would have given up and pushed to move the meetings back 
to west Flag months ago. If the group wants to try to *do* something, 
fantastic, I'm in.

>I personally attend fewer meetings since it was cut to one a month...Those 
>with the shortest commute seem to show up.

Moving to a bi-monthly meeting, one "formal" (USGS) and one "social" 
(coffee shop or whatever) was suggested a couple times. Carolyn and I were 
the only ones who bit at the idea.

>...Open Source and Linux centric and the new people want to change it.

Personally, I support an Open Source and Linux focus -- it's a LUG after 
all. The ideas about "branching out" into other computing topics are mainly 
folks' brainstorming to find new ways to expand active participation, 
provide useful information for members, create a pool of interesting 
subjects for presentations and projects, etc. If you'd like to participate 
in that conversation and think you have ideas for increasing membership, 
raising public awareness, and energizing the group, we'd all love to hear 
your input.

deborah