[Discuss] Results from VLUG's AGM

[Corey Burger]

On Dec 12, 2007 6:36 PM, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
> On 2007-12-12 16:47-0800 David Lee wrote:
>
> > I'm finding this rather ironic :)
> >
> > Years ago, we started as a(n) SIG at BB&C in the back room. The numbers
> > started getting bigger and bigger. It was amazing how many we packed in that
> > little room!
> > Then we finally ended up at Uvic.
> > Now the numbers are dwindling and dwindling and we're going back to a room at
> > BB&C.
> >
> > There's a story in there somewhere. :)
> >
> > Maybe we should find out why the numbers are going down.
>
> One reason is that in the old days Linux was exciting and new but a real
> pain to install so you could have an interesting and viable club that
> focussed on installfests and presenting neat new software packages (e.g.,
> KDE, GNOME, the GIMP, EMACS, GNUPG) which hardly anybody had ever seen
> demonstrated before.

The other major issue is that before Linux was mostly hard to setup,
so a night of how to compile your kernel was well received. Now people
actually do things on Linux :)

When I was in South Africa I gave a talk to the Cape LUG and chatted
with them about their group. Although they, like us, have a hard core
group, new talks about how to do basic things in GNOME/KDE are still
well recevied. If we move back into BB&C a great source of new meeting
goers might be a "you have linux, now what".

Corey