Re: [oclug] OCLUG needs a newbies night

Summary:
- Lets start some discussion.
- Follow up on this mailing list to let us know what talks you'd like
  to hear at OCLUG meetings or tutorials.
- What level of talks, beginner, intermediate, advanced.
- If you're a beginner but don't know what you need to know, send mail
  about that too.
- Also follow up if you can give a talk about something.  Even if you
  can give a short talk on something you know about, it could still be
  informative for someone just learning that topic.


Brad Barnett writes:
| On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:51:08 +0000
| William Case <[email protected]> wrote:
...
| > 
| > Roland Renaud who has been arranging speakers for the last year, has
| > asked several times for suggested topics.  We discussed having
| > lightening talks for newbies and as refresher for the rest of us at one
| > of our recent meetings.  If newcomers want introductory talks, just
| > email [email protected].  I am sure there are plenty of members who are
| > willing to do a quick talk and invite people to the beer sig for follow
| > up.

Rather than sending mail directly to Roland, suggestions and
discussions about meetings and events should go to
    [email protected].
That's the official purpose of the list:
    http://oclug.on.ca/mailing_lists/
    - oclug-events a discussion list and archives - An open list used
      to plan special events and coordinate meetings. 
As a subscriber to the list, I'll still read your mail and so will others.
Your ideas on meeting suggestions might inspire other suggestions or
encourage someone to give a talk on that subject.

By sending mail to the list, you eliminate the need for a single
person to respond to your mail in the event the contact person changes
or is unable to read your email.  Fault tolerance eh?

On that topic, the group will be electing a (possibly) new board of
directors at the April meeting.  This is a good time to discuss how we
want to improve OCLUG, its meetings and what we consider to be an
improvement.

We usually have over 50 people at each meeting.  Some attend,
regardless of the meeting topic but there is also a group composed of
people who only attend if the meeting agenda is interesting to them.
The mailing list is a good way for those people to indicate what they
might be looking for or to volunteer to speak on a particular topic.

| Hi Bill,
| 
| I think there is a miscommunication here.
| 
| It isn't really possible for a new Linux user, who is attending OCLUG for
| the first time, and wanting help with his machine.. to email Roland
| three months before he's tried Linux, and request help.

I'm reminded of one of my university math professors who assumed that
we understood what he was teaching because there were few questions.
We had to inform him that we were sometimes unable to formulate a
reasonable question but that didn't indicate we understood what he was
trying to teach.

I think it's the same for novices, they can't request a talk on topic
"foo" because they don't know that "foo" is preventing their computer
from doing what they expect it to.

| I think the reoccurring requested theme I've seen over this list for the
| last seven years or so, is a permanent, every meeting night, help for
| novices assist.

At the March meeting, I asked who considered themselves to be 'fairly
new to Linux' and saw 20 - 25% of the audience raise their hands.
However, OCLUG has been around for a while so we also need to keep it
interesting for the more experienced users.

We need to discuss how to have a mix of meetings or topics at the
existing meetings that is useful and interesting to the range of
members.

This needs to be discussed further; probably on the oclug-events
mailing list since not all members attend the meetings.

In the unlikely event that the traffic on this list gets excessive,
don't worry, the final results will still end up in oclug-announce and
on the website.

BTW, who's a novice?  Some of us have been using computers running
Unix, Linux and other systems for many years and can claim some
knowledge on certain topics.  However, the time we spent on those
topics prevented us from learning others so we are still novices on
those topics.  Personally, I'll admit to being a novice on many topics.

| Keep in mind that you may be in a situation where you have relatively few
| novices at the meeting, as meetings are over their head, and therefore
| you have no novices to request tutorials!
| 
| Chicken and the egg thing, you know.  After all, would you want to be a
| member of a club that taught you absolutely nothing useful, confused you
| to no end, because everything was over your head?
| 
| Would you continue to go to meetings about iptables, you name it, when
| you didn't know what 'ls' was?
| 
| Note, OCLUG may wish to remain more in the realm of the non-newbie.
| Frankly, while I've done tons of work in the past assisting new users, I
| have little desire to do so now.  I can't think of anything more draining
| than helping grandma learn how to plug a USB flash drive into her
| machine, again and again.
| 
| Probably a result of working in IT support for years, of course.

I've also worked in IT support and although my users had more computer
background than grandma, I appreciate that someone might be skilled in
one aspect of computers but support on a new (to them) topic is much
appreciated.  I appreciate that you've had your fill of this but it
still might be useful for OCLUG to pursue.  If you're there, we'll
have to give you the tricky ones.  :-)

| Maybe there should be an entirely different meeting night for new users,
| staffed by not-quite-as-new-users.  I once was a member of a club, that
| did just that.  Other years, said club, always started 2 hours earlier
| for novices.  
| 
| Anyhow, just some thoughts.
| 
| > If there is a huge response we can arrange a tutorial night -- or
| > something.

OCLUG used to have tutorials on a different night.  They've recently
tended to the expert end of the field but we could possibly have some
beginner talks at either a different time or location.

Most conferences have different tracks for different topics (eg:
novice, expert) but this suggests more speakers and probably more
rooms.  I don't know if that would be workable with the current size
of the group.

Michael Richardson once suggested we have experts track and a novice
track.  He thought it could work in a single room but I think it would
be difficult to have simultaneous talks in our current room.

I appreciate the room we have at Algonquin but it's just not designed
for simultaneous talks.  Maybe we can get T117 and T119 in the future?
Either way, we'd need more speakers to run multiple tracks.

For the last year, I've been speaker "co-ordinator" but it has been
mostly of a job of getting enough speakers to fill the meeting rather
than co-ordinating and selecting which topics would mix to make an
interesting meeting.

It's been a bit of work but if people want me to, I'll try to improve
on it in the next year.

We just need more feedback on what types of topics people want
... and more speakers.  :-)

roland