[wplug-erie] Re: MINUTES FOR Erie LUG @ Sun, Jun 11 1pm - 2pm (1 hr)

[Jesse Madsen]

ERIE LUG REVIVAL MEETING 6/11/06

Meeting was held to begin process of defining and forming a Linux User 
Group in Erie. Attendees were as follows:

Bill, Bruce, Keith, Mike, Craig, Ed, Jesse, Ryan, Jerry, Beth

VENUES

Venues were considered including Library, Barnes & Noble, Mercyhurst, 
Kathy's Cybercafe, Face to Face and Panera Bread. Craig & Ryan offered 
up Myer's Tech Service which will be opening on W. 26'th St soon. 
There's also a coffee shop (Brick House) on W. 26'th that has wireless 
web access. Circuit City & Best Buy were explicitly mentioned as not 
amenable to hosting a group.

MEETING SCHEDULE

Preliminary scope of group was discussed. Consensus was 4-6 meetings per 
year was a reasonable schedule not including carpools to WPLUG meetings. 
Any group leaving Erie at 8:30 Saturday will be in Pittsburgh in plenty 
of time for the WPLUG meeting. There are numerous options for parking in 
Erie for carpools.

MEETING STRUCTURE

Aspects of meetings were reviewed including general and administrative 
meetings, the administrative meetings being the portion where decisions 
were made and logistical details worked out.

MEETING TOPICS

We reviewed beginner meetings, social meetings, technical/advanced 
meetings and install fests. We also spoke about show & tells for 
specific areas of interest (Myth TV, forensics, robots, cryptography) to 
highlight what people are doing with Linux.
Other types of meetings were tutorials, (usually >= 1/2 day). Beth also 
talked about a meeting where four different members talked about four 
different distros. Other ideas for topics of interest for the group may 
be petitioned via the web. Jesse volunteered to generate a web poll.

Main thing for a successful meeting is to have an agenda in advance to 
include events, purpose & timeline.

LEGAL STUFF

While advocating for open source solutions, Erie LUG has full respect 
for IP, copyrights, software patents... All topics presented must be 
mindful of and compliant with these entities.

ORGANIZATION

There are three ways to run the LUG including benevolent dictatorship, 
Ad Hocracy, and with an organized board/by laws.

Problem with first is that the leadership needs to be trusted to make 
decision & have authority to delegate.  The last option would be 
inefficient for a group this size.

We decided to go with an AdHocracy where Matt would be the Volunteer 
Coordinator. In this capacity, he will identify logistical items that 
need completed (carpools, web coordinator...) and petition group for 
volunteers. If a volunteer is unable to complete their task, Volunteer 
Coordinator will find someone else to cover.

COMMUNICATIONS

It would be nice to again have the erielug.org domain. In the meantime 
we have a space available on the wplug.org site.

Email and IRC were reviewed as possible candidates for general group 
communications. The google calendar was also considered for scheduling 
and worked well for this first meeting.

Need for an erielug info responder was reviewed, but not assigned. This 
volunteer would be responsible for answering administrative questions 
about times & locations and would also route other traffic to 
appropriate locations. Any takers are invited to contact Matt.

We talked about a wiki. If done with our server, this would require 
applications (MySQL/PHP servers) to support dynamic web pages. If this 
format is decided on, we may consider outsourcing initially. This would 
require moderation or password protection to prevent becoming SPLOG.

PUBLICITY

Jeremy volunteered to post something for next meeting which will be a 
show & tell on Myth TV and PVR.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Towards end of meeting, five participants expressed interest in 
attending install fest in Pittsburgh 7/8/06. Ryan volunteered to send 
something to mailing list with proposed launch point for carpool. It was 
recommended to bring a few bucks for gas & pizza.

Next Erie LUG meeting will be in August. Bill will present. Date/time 
are TBD.