[From nobody Tue Oct 16 22:49:37 2012
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 16:20:32 -0500
From: dan vogel <dmv@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Is there a meeting anytime?
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21L.0102121402280.11394-100000@unix12.andrew.cmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


As a reminder, there is a movie this evening: 2001.  This is definately
worth the time and effort if you've never seen it (or not in a long
time).  

With regards to the club being dead: "We're not dead yet".  It just
looks that way.  As an insider to the organization, I think I can
provide some of the why?

 - Size:  The club was, effectively, dead when "we" took it over
	  in Spring 1999.  For whatever reason, the main participant
	  in the "coup" had the impression that the death was mostly
	  a function of the long standing control of the organization
	  by folks who had ceased to be students (or care?).  The real
	  result was that the club became the size of the participants
	  in the "coup".  Over the past 2 years we've grown by
	  approximately one.

 - Purpose: The standing historical theory on the death of the club is
          that it had lost its need or relevance.  The heydays of the 
	  club were the 70s and 80s.  By the mid-90s, 
          "everyone" effectively had more than enough computer to play
	  with in their room.  The school of computer science was here.
          Any interest people had outside of academics in doing
          interesting things with computers could probably be
          accomplished on their personal computer.  Social outlets could
	  be found in the KGB or similar organizations, or in the free
	  software world.  The original purposes of the club have become
          obselete.  No one has yet to come up with the purpose of the 
	  club in this decade.

 - Motivation: In line with the purpose, the motivations behind spending
          time working on the computer club organization leave much to
	  be desired.  The machine room as it is offers some great 
	  learning opportunities for system administration skills to be
	  developed, resume-fodder et al: run live AFS, WWW, DNS, SMTP,
          NNTP services.  Another victim of interest, free software, and
          the time sucking properties of SCS and CMU.

 - Limitations: As a result, the abilities of the club are limited by
          the time, motivations, and interests of the few folks involved
          in the club.  We'd like to have other people express any
          interest -- but the notion that we can provide a constant, or
          any, stream of meetings and lectures is... well -- why?

Therefore, the club exists as an outlet of the interest of the present
members.  There is not the density or motivation to put in the massive
effort to completely overhaul the club into a modern organization and
attract membership.  The club presently does what we can.  Ask not what
the club can do for you -- ask what you can do for the club.  At that
same time, would you please also answer what you want the club to do
that you'd be interested in expending any kind of effort on?  Talk is
cheap: organizing talks is time consuming.  And we get such pathetic
repeat participation -- populations, even -- that the motivation has to
be personal.  

This is why the CLUG died: at the last talk, *NO ONE* showed up.  Just
the people who set it up.  We postered, made prior announcements, etc.
Clearly, there was little interest!  And from that, it became apparent
that if we were interested in learning about something, its easier to
approach a professor or researcher for information and discussion rather
than for the purpose of arranging a public talk.  And while the CLUG was
fine, there was too much passive interest.

And so we are left with a neglected AFS cell, an overloaded,
underappreciated NNTP server, and a movie series.  Movies are relatively
easy (though it must be subsidized by us, because the club is broke) and
relatively entertaining.  If someone would like to do something under
the banner of the computer club, or discuss these issues -- come to the
movie tonight and talk with us, or send us email.  info@club.cc.cmu.edu.

Thank you.

								dan



]