[wplug-board] Possible group outing, possible future GUM presentation

[Pat Barron]

On 1/23/2013 10:46 PM, Justin Smith wrote:
> I don't care for baseball or the Pirates, myself, but if it's 
> something the members would be interested in, I'm all for it.

It's so cheap, I may do it (out of my own pocket, if necessary), 
regardless of whether there's active member interest expressed in 
advance - as long as the Board or the program committee approve putting 
WPLUG's name on the event.  I mean, in the end, it may cost $20.00, as 
long as the tickets are surcharge-free if picked up in person (which I 
can do).  I think 12 tickets would be sufficient, and in fact I'm not 
sure you can buy more tickets than that in a block from the retail web 
site.  (You're probably not alone among our membership in not caring for 
baseball or the Pirates, so I'm not thinking the small number of tickets 
is a bottleneck.)

> /If/ we do this, I'd like to work this into our advertising like I 
> tried to do for January's GUM. We could say something like "How much 
> do baseball tickets and stadium food usually cost? Join WPLUG and get 
> free tickets to the game, free food, /and/ a membership in the hottest 
> Linux user group in Pittsburgh!"

Sure (just keeping in mind the food wouldn't be on WPLUG, but $1.00 for 
a hot dog ... can't beat that).

> If we're ever going to get more paying members, we need to run 
> promotions like this from time to time.

Totally agree.

> In regard to the presentation...like Joe said, we need a presenter for 
> February, so feel free to proceed. Say, do you know anything about 
> OpenVPN, Pat? Since certificates are a part of it, maybe you could 
> include that as part of your presentation. Lots of people use free 
> public Wi-Fi; you could make it about how to protect against 
> eavesdropping while you're doing it with OpenVPN on Linux /and/ Android.

I know just a little about OpenVPN, per se - but I certainly know about 
VPN infrastructures in general.  I would be concerned that "Private CA + 
OpenVPN" is starting to get into a fairly lengthy presentation (in order 
to do justice to the presentation of either of them individually), it 
might be smart to break that material over two GUMs.  For a group like 
WPLUG, I'd kind of prefer to keep "sit and listen to me" presentations 
to about 30 minutes or so if possible, unless there's a demo involved or 
something.

--Pat.

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