[colug-432] The Future of COLUG?

[Steve Potter]

I was looking around OLF this weekend and thinking it was really pretty 
small compared to previous years I've been.  I think we've become 
inundated by user groups and meetups and communities that are so 
fractured and specialized, and every group and event gets smaller and 
smaller, and harder and harder to find content that hasn't already been 
covered by something else.

Looking at just MeetUp in Columbus, there's 3 Kubernetes groups (4 if 
you add Docker), 6 Agile groups, 8 Cloud groups (one overlaps with 
Kubernetes), 6 Coding, 4 Big Data, a dozen different various programming 
languages (including frameworks on top of individual languages)...  and 
that doesn't include the various groups, like COLUG and LOPSA, that 
don't even show up on MeetUp. On top of that, there's mailing lists and 
podcasts and webinars and videos and very cheap online classes that are 
more real-time and enable people to pick up the basics and majority of 
what they generally want or need.

It is hard to find the time to decide what, if any, of the various 
groups and meetings have a relevant and interesting topic any particular 
month.  I try to come to meetings when I can, but with family and - 
until recently - a fairly generic admin/engineer job, it didn't seem to 
happen very often.

Now that I've throw out all the negatives... I would love to see COLUG 
revitalized and collaborating with some of the other groups around town 
to hold joint meetings, particularly when topics overlap.  If someone is 
giving a presentation on IaC using Terraform, it would be nice if I 
could find it on any of COLUG, LOPSAcbus, DevOps, CHUG, CAWS-meetup, or 
C-GCP, or whatever (BTW, LOPSAcbus is having a presentation on AWS using 
Terraform this month).

I never know what to give a talk about (except as an SE, but that seems 
really self serving) and rarely think anything I'm working on is that 
interesting or that I've got enough depth to talk about it.  Maybe if 
someone maintained a list of topics people were interested in, it would 
spur people to say "Oh, maybe I could do that".

-spp
On 11/4/2019 4:32 PM, Eric Garver wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2019 at 11:08:45AM -0500, Scott Merrill wrote:
>> Hello friends!
>>
>> As you all have realized, I've been pretty uninvolved with COLUG of
>> late.  I haven't attempted to schedule a meeting in a long time. The
>> mailing list is extremely low-volume.
>>
>> What should we do?  Are y'all happy with this? Do you have a need for
>> a Linux User Group to help you solve problems and learn new things?
>> Are you all finding community and support elsewhere?
>>
>> I was approached at OLF about breathing new life into the group by
>> Chris Punches.  He has some big ideas, and I'm happy to see them come
>> to life.  But this is an eclectic group of passionate folks, so I want
>> to start a public conversation about what *you* all see as the future
>> of COLUG, and how you want to participate with it.
> I lurk the list, but would like to see more activity. I would also be
> interested in an IRC channel (or Matrix) for off-list banter - I'm not
> aware of an existing one.
>
> As for meetups, I would definitely be willing to give talks concerning
> my day job (firewalld, nftables, linux firewalling in general) if others
> are interested in hearing them. Maybe I'm living in a hole, but meetups
> seem very few and far between.