[colug-432] The Future of COLUG?

[Chris Punches]

Hey Folks,

Thanks for the introduction, Scott.

I've been circling around the lug for a few years watching and reiterate
most of the desires expressed here by the others as I've been kind of
looking at where our strong areas are and also our areas of potential
growth/revival.

I've got a vision for it I'd like to bring about.  We should probably all
meet if we need a consensus on this to get started.

Some highlights are below, and some of these are further out in the
timeline if we can get on the right path for it:

   - New identity for the LUG
      - Status quo isn't working.  This is a rescue-and-revive effort.
      - Incorporation.
      - Fortifies many facets of the org, including identity formation, org
      structure, budget, etc; Cincinnati and Cleveland let their entity
      registration die out w/ the Ohio Secretary of State, so, once we
have this,
      we'll automatically have some cool options available to us that the other
      lugs in this state don't.
      - Org Structure
      - Formal owners and officers, deciding panels et al; no overkill on
      structure but "the basics".  This lug will absolutely peter out
without it.
      - A donation-driven budget.
      - Events, 3rd party certifications for members, permanent space,
      hosting, branding, etc
   - Getting COLUG to be a hub of sorts for R&D for the Linux community
   across the state and eventually serve as kind of a focal point for Linux in
   Ohio.  Actual system development taking place.  Imagine.
   - Partnering with local entities for space, budget, hosting.
   - Rebranding
   - Providing useful community resources that establish the LUG as a place
   people go to find topic authorities in the Linux SE crowd.
   - Getting the headcount up to about 25 active people.

I also really like some of the suggestions, here too, like event
aggregation with some of these related-but-different groups in the area.

Regarding the IRC channel, FreeNode/##colug used to have a couple people
but the channel ownership got muddy over the years and it died out.  I
registered FreeNode/#ohlug-central if you'd like to use that.

I'd like to call a meeting for us to discuss in more detail if everyone's
alright with that?

-C

On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 1:22 AM Steve Potter <spp at unixsa.net> wrote:

> 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.
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