Re: Is this Linux User Group still active?

On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Kendall Dugger wrote:

> I'm up for organizing a new group, but it might be easier to do if we

I am rather confused.. did you see my previous message?  What is wrong with 
LUNI.  It is true that we did not have any meetings in downtown area 
recently, I have no problem with you starting to have them.

There are at leat 4-5 active groups in the area already, most have very good
relationship with LUNI, like having the same mailing list.

Please see the mailing list archives for LUNI-announce and LUNI on the 
luni.org web site.

We do have monthly meetings, however they are currently at the College of 
DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL along with InstallFest, usually last Sunday of the 
month from 10 am to 3 pm.

> contacted the previous group organizers and get some pointers and perhaps a
> member list if such a thing exists.  In other words, it would probably be

There is no way you are going to get a member list at this point, you may
post to LUNI mailing list however if you wish to start a new list people
can subscribe there.

I would strongly recommend against that, LUNI mailing list has over 450 
people on it, and is the mailing list for *multiple* area LUGs.

> I'm posting this message to LUNI-D as well so that others on the list can
> fill in the blanks as well.

Please review the last 2-3 messages that have been sent to you, LUNI-D is 
the off-topic/non-technical list of the LUNI, the real/linux list is called 
LUNI.

> What sort of attendance did you have before?  If the group was small (under
> 20 people) we could meet at my office in the loop.  If only 4 or 5 people
> were there, we could easily meet in my conference room and talk about
> growing the group and getting people involved.

Downtown meetings usually had about a dozen people, unless we had something 
specifically interesting (say Randal Swartz, which drew at least 100).

> My image for the group would be an organization that met once a month with
> an organized intro, followed by a round the room intro of each member
> present (what they do, how they use linux, etc.) followed by a 30 minute
> talk/lecture (a topic of the day with follow-on open discussion).
> Afterwards, we could just hang out and chat... for those that want to
> hang-out longer, we could pick a cafe like the 'Gourmande' to move the
> discussion to.

Peachy..

> I don't want to have a group that has to pay membership dues and gets a
> snail-mail newsletter, etc.  I'm more interested in just meeting more people
> who have an interest in Linux and the vast assortment of software that is
> available to run on it.

...
> Do you have any contact information concerning the previous organizers?
...
> If you have the contact info for the previous organizers that would help
> greatly.

There are a number of groups that use the LUNI mailing list, the mailing 
list itself is ran by me, I used to organize CLUG/LUNI meetings downtown in 
the UIC area with others' help.

/Seva