[CALUG] Tux.org at FOSE

[Jim Sansing]

To everyone who wasn't at the meeting last night (and as a follow-up to
those who were), I had a great time at FOSE, in spite of the fact that I
was standing all day except for a 1/2 hour lunch break.  The best part
was the enthusiasm of people coming to the booth--we didn't have a break
in the traffic for at least 4 hours.  The next best part was meeting
people from other LUGs.  And that started me thinking (again) that we
should try to establish more contact with them--like at least once or
twice a year.

I checked out the http://www.tux.org site today.  The events besides
FOSE where tux.org has manned a booth include LISA (2006) and DC PHP
(2006).  Based on my participation at FOSE this year, they are pretty
good at getting a booth and setting it up.  But since they don't do it
very often, they ended up scrambling for stuff to hand out and there
wasn't a co-ordinated message.

I printed a couple hundred data sheets about CALUG and the Ubuntu
Maryland Community Team, and that was the only info anyone coming to the
booth could take away with them.  There was a tux.org banner, and we
told people to visit the site for other LUGs.  For swag, we had a box of
Linux Journals and a bunch of bootable CDs/DVDs.  However, a lot of them
were for 64-bit machines.

There was a mailing list set up for everyone who volunteered to work at
FOSE, and there is still a lot of discussion going on about packing up,
so I'm going to wait a couple of days and send a follow-up email to find
out how much is already happening between the other area LUGs.

While it's a starting point, tux.org it isn't being real actively
maintained.  By that, I mean that there are a lot of stale links to LUGs
(and the CALUG link has the wrong contact info).  However, over half of
the links are still good, so it is an interesting list.  To build
relationships, it will probably take contacting each one individually,
and I would like to have some idea of what we at CALUG would like to do
before starting that.

Personally, I think it would be best to start small.  But maybe Bridge
Education, introduced to us last night by Tom Vielandi as the Canonical
representative for the area, would be willing to let us use some of
their 8 classrooms for a 6 - 8 hour conference on a weekend (they would
obviously get to put their literature in the hands of people with a
known interest in FOSS IT).  With that, we could ask the closest LUGs to
host 1 or 2 presentations / events each, and then invite all of the
Mid-Atlantic LUGs, as well as the general public, to attend.  At the end
of the day, we could have a 'where we go from here' meeting, and I'm
sure we could set up a mailing list on tux.org for inter-LUG communication.

At the very least, we should be able to do a bang-up job of representing
Linux at every IT event in the area.

So what are your thoughts?

Later . . .   Jim


Haroon Khalid wrote:
> Do you know of any other upcoming events similar to the FOSE event? I
> would like to start attending some open source related events like
> this one.
>
> On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 5:42 PM, Jim Sansing <jjsansing at verizon.net
> <mailto:jjsansing at verizon.net>> wrote:
>
>     I have volunteered to work the Tux.org booth at FOSE.  I will be there
>     on Tues., the day before the next CALUG meeting.  However, if
>     anyone has
>     any swag that I could hand out to advertise CALUG or Linux in general,
>     I'd be happy to meet with you and pick it up.  Ideas for talking
>     points
>     are also welcome.
>
>     Later . . .   Jim
>
>
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