Re: SVLUG meetings, and lack of

On 1/16/19 11:25 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> An enormously generous gentleman named Kevin Dankwardt has for the last
> few years both lined up technical speakers for monthly SVLUG meetings
> and supplied an excellent meeting venue, the cafeteria at Cavium, an
> embedded Linux company in north San Jose -- amusingly, about a block 
> south of the old north San Jose Karl's Jr. community room where SVLUG 
> met for long years through the middle 1990s.  
> 
> Well...  Kevin no longer works in San Jose, but rather for some firm in
> San Francisco.  I strongly suspect this means there's no practical way
> he can sponsor events at Cavium, though I haven't asked.  I notice that
> Kevin's two Meetups (including the one he has generously sponsored for
> SVLUG's Meetup presence)

I reimbursed him for that actually, but never got around to giving him a logo to put up on the meetup.

> have had no meetings since SVLUG's most recent
> meeting in July 2018 -- except that is Silicon Valley Linux Technology
> Meetup finally had an interesting meeting this past evening at a new
> venue in San Francisco.
> 
> The end-result is that SVLUG's meeting program has for now gone defunct,
> having neither anyone in this area lining up speakers nor (I infer) an
> evening meeting venue suitable for technical presentations.   I'm going
> to soon update www.svlug.org to say meetings have been suspended.
> 
> 
> If any of y'all would like to _resume_ meetings, I would suggest
> starting small.  The easly, low-hanging fruit is to find a restaurant 
> that reliably has unoccupied large tables where one or two groups of 
> (say) 8 or 12 people can sit, and eat, and chat.

I regrettably have not made time to come to meetings regularly. If there is interest and speakers I could probably arrange for space at hacker dojo.
Alternately, facilitron https://www.facilitron.com/ rents school facilities for extremely reasonable rates and probably everyone chipping in 5 bucks
would easily cover costs.

One observation is that with meetup.com and how massively successful Linux has become in the last 20 years, it might be good to understand what the
purpose of this group is vs. other groups. For example I think there are a massive number of meetups focused on Linux as a server, but there still
might be worth in talking about the end user experience for Linux. I'm using Ubuntu for my laptop for example.

Resuming installfests would probably help revive the this group, if this group wants to be revived. If there were enough people from this group who
were willing to help with doing installs, I could probably put an installfest on the calendar at Hacker dojo for a Saturday in April. It might be a
nice thing to advertise at local schools and colleges.

Incidentally, I'm probably giving a talk at SCALE and it would be nice to practice that in advance, like around the end of February. The title is
"Accidentally Accessible: a Mostly-FOSS Workflow" and I'll be giving it along with my employee who is blind. Does anyone want to hear that?

--Sarah