[Lugcomms] LUG Comms meet-up - ideas and stuff

[Paul Wayper]

Hi people,

Last night at the meeting the predominate topic of conversation (i.e. 
basically Josh Hesketh's idea) was how to get a face-to-face meeting for LUG 
coordinators, delegates and friends.  The idea would be to spend a day or 
weekend talking about how to improve our own LUGs and how to improve the 
coordination and co-operation between them.  Josh's idea is to get Linux 
Australia funding for this to both find a place to hold it (my thought would 
be to see if we can convince some of the people in Google Sydney to give us 
access to a room and interwaves) and possibly to fund some airfares for people 
to get there.

Linux Australia funding, for those that don't know, is based on a proposal; in 
return for the funding you provide some kind of benefit to Linux Australia and 
the Linux / FOSS community.  My personal approach here is to avoid agendas, 
constitutions, mission statements and deliverables; but I think we can still 
have an awesome time sharing ideas.  The question is how to pitch it.

I'm at OSDC this morning and Karen Pooley (a Belfastian living in Tokyo) was 
talking about volunteers.  She's had to deal with the Perl community, which 
has had to have meetings and plans and stuff, and I asked her how to avoid 
this.  She made the excellent point that maybe one benefit to the community is 
that everyone that attends will blog about what they've done, post to their 
local LUG lists, and do whatever else they can to let people know the good 
ideas that were thought of during the session.

My other little hobby horse is the club-in-a-box project, closely allied to 
the LUG-in-a-box project.  My project has a trac site at 
http://tangram.dnsalias.net/trac/clubinabox/ at which everyone is welcome to 
add ideas and stuff - email me if you want to get commit access to the 
repository.  The aim of club-in-a-box is to provide a software system (written 
in Django) to run a LUG website - welcome pages, meeting organiser, news 
posts, etc.  The aim of LUG-in-a-box is to wrap something like that up, along 
with Apache, database, and Linux server, in a virtual machine that Linux 
Australia can host for LUGs (or they can host for themselves once they get big 
enough).

It would be really cool, in my not so humble opinion, to have a hackfest on 
something like this.  That would be a real product that we could show to Linux 
Australia at the end of the weekend as proof of what we'd done.  My feeling is 
that both of these projects are also great things to get inter-LUG 
collaboration on - to give a shared project that people across Australia and 
the world can work on together to both contribute code and meet new people.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I think that Josh's idea of getting LA 
funding is great.

Have fun,

Paul