As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s been difficult to maintain a regular schedule of BLUG virtual presenters, and to be honest, the attendance on our best virtual meetings is roughly the attendance on our worst in-person meetings.
So, I’m asking you all, what do we want to do about it? Should we stop doing the virtual meetings - but BLUG on hold until we can get back in person? Is it a matter of the content presented?
As an alternative, we’ll also be posting info about other events of interest, both locally and online (I’m sure you already noticed two of those today).
So, please let me know what you think we should do moving forward…
Consistent meeting time: first Thursday. Notification if it’s cancelled.
Publicity about meetings & meeting topics:
Kevin did a good survey of available distros, which was apparently based on appealing to new users. But it seemed like every attendee already had a go-to. How would new users have known about this presentation?
FOSS is a big category. Who’s the audience for the BLUG meetings? What topics would be appealing? I just read about Mercedes Benz & Automotive Grade Linux; seemed interesting. Containerization. The Open Source Way has wide application beyond technology.
In-person meetings and Meetups are limited geographically. Virtual meetings allow for more dispersed audiences and remote speakers…publicity challenges.
In-person meetings can be threatening to people who are new to technology or Linux. It’s easy to say, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question.”, but it doesn’t feel that way. Virtual meetings can be structured to be less intimidating.
In-person meetings allow for cross talk, simultaneous conversations, moving to have one-on-one chats.
Meeting in person has space for socializing, but there is one presenter, one presentation, usually with some interaction and questions.
Maybe start the virtual meeting with one room and have breakout rooms for different presentations or topics.
Bring LFNW and BLUG back together for monthly installments:
Presumably LFNW has enough money to get a Zoom subscription.
Recorded sessions and multiple breakout rooms. The breakout rooms can be recorded with the meeting host entering the rooms to allow recording.
Announce to the LFNW audience and do a Call for Papers on LFNW social media.
Figure out a Zoom hallway track. One of the benefits of in-person is interacting with people periodically. Lot better than sitting at home freaking out about THE DELTA VARIANT!
Like @kallewa said, a consistent meeting time would help tremendously. I don’t know how many people usually attend, but I would also second the suggestion to move away from google for meeting hosting (both for features, and because there is a significant overlap between likes linux and dislikes google). Zoom is one option, if the groups are small enough for Jitsi (scales well to around 30 active participants, free version allows 100 total), it is reliable too. Something which allows multiple “rooms” and easy bouncing between them might be a good idea. Discord can do that, but doesn’t allow anonymous access, which is a significant drawback.
As for content and presentations… I think we should lower the bar for content. There are likely attendees with either interesting projects or in need of technical help, if we have even a fairly short and simple presentation, that’s probably fine. I know I have several topics which could easily be half a meeting.
I for one would love to attend meetings in whatever form they come. My life has just gotten to crazy to find the time for them. This pandemic has broken a great many things. I am looking forward to the time when I can get back to hanging out with all of you and listening to much smarter people then I talk about awesome hardware and software.
I probably could… That is 3 weeks out, so plenty of time to put something together. Question is what, and how long of a presentation.
Here are the topics I could easily cover 3 weeks from now.
Binary-distro gentoo on raspberry pi 3 and 4, which has some interesting challenges.
Emacs as an IDE, from an empty .emacs.d to a fully-featured IDE.
Running other webservers behind a transparent reverse proxy.
C++20 Modules, no more #include nightmare (with clang++ and libcxx).
If any of those are sufficiently interesting, I’d be happy to devise a suitable presentation. (If any of the long-term members have something they want to do, I’m also happy to wait, as none of them are particularly time-sensitive).
