On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 02:17:03PM -0400, Rick Malone wrote: > Since I am not sure who is receiving this email I'm not sure how to proceed You have reached the general-distribution list of OCLUG. > with my question. I am interested in starting a LUG in Petawawa just about > an hour and a half along highway 17 west of Ottawa. Great! > I was there when the KLUG was started in Kingston in 1998/99 but being 1 of > about 6 members who got together to form the group I had only a minor role > in setting things up. > > Would a member of OCLUG perhaps be willing to provide some guidance on how > to get a future PetLUG (I don't like PLUG but I'd use it if I had to ;-)) > off the ground? > > I have a facility where we can meet on a regular basis. I guess I need > everything else. You have done one of the hard parts. Hopefully your facility is relatively easy to get to and has good parking, and is maybe even free. And has a few power outlets (for people's laptops, and for demo machines) and a projector and screen. And wireless. So much for venue. Then the next most important part is speakers/topics. You can get away with not arranging topics at each meeting, but attendance tends to be better with pre-arranged topics and speakers. Some groups like to have a formal meeting/presentation, then go out to a pub/restaurant for socializing. Others just have their meeting at the restaurant/pub. Personally I think having the whole meeting at the restaurant/pub keeps away people on stringent budgets and possibly people who don't want to drink alcohol. At OCLUG we boost the socializing/community-growing aspect of our formal meetings by asking an ice-breaker question at each meeting. We make up some question (different for every meeting), and in the meeting we ask each person to say their name and to answer the question. The question might be what's your favourite distro, when did you start using Linux, what's your favourite app in Linux, even "what's your favourite text editor" if we're feeling scrappy. Just an excuse to get people to say something about themselves, that gives others a reason to talk to them at the socializing part of the meeting. You might like to put up a web site that says - when and where the meetings are - next topic and speaker - other stuff Check out the OCLUG web site oclug.on.ca. The source code for it is available ... somewhere. We can get it to you if you want it. It's a django-based front page, with a wiki for some pages. As a LUG, you may have a few members who would like to volunteer to write/maintain your site, or you can always just host it somewhere like meetup.com. You may want to have a mailing list (like this one). However, it seems mailing lists are becoming old-fashioned and the new way to reach people with with Facebook and Twitter. This is a problem because some Linux people won't touch Facebook and Twitter. A bit of a generation gap happening here. My advice: try to do both and stay in contact with both sides of the divide. You need the young people or your group will die off (or move away and dwindle to nothing). If you have a free location, you can probably run your LUG without collecting dues and without incorporating. If you have an inexpensive venue, you can still run your LUG without incorporating, but someone will have to be the contact person if you want to run any events (by "contact person" I mean put themselves on the line for signing contracts, paying bills etc) and you may have to collect contributions at each meeting to pay for the room. The members will have to trust the person collecting the money. It can be low-key, or more organized - as you like. I would avoid the incorporation until such time as the lack of incorporation gets to be a pain. That's because being incorporated is a bit of a pain itself, unless you like filing paperwork with the gov't and having admin meetings. Well that's all I'll say for now. Maybe others will chime in. > Thank you and hopefully we'll be able to get together with the OCLUG at > some point in the futrue and share some things. Sure that would be great. Maybe people here might go there for a visit too, if your scheduled meeting isn't on the same day as ours. You can also talk to some OCLUG members on irc: oftc.net #oclug bjb