Colin Hards clive1248@hotmail.com wrote:
[...] I've been to four of five ALUG meetings and to me they're a waste of time. They're disorganised, and have no focus or agenda, no advance billing of what's to occur. With one exception I don't think I've learnt anything practical from any of these meetings. [...]
Well, what can you do to help fix it? It sounds as though you have some clear ideas about what you'd like to see happen at a meeting, so help us to make it reality. I would say that there is advance billing of as much as we're aware of, but maybe it needs more planned activities and more circulation. How to organise that?
Personally, I'm always willing to help find speakers, give talks, etc, but Norwich is just too far away for me now to give practical help with things like venues and hosting. Syd, BJ and Rob are nominal venue hosts at the moment, but I suspect all would welcome help. I think Adam is trying to keep the meeting planner after my spectacular failure earlier this year. Adam, BJ and myself admin the main list. The social list doesn't seem to need much admin, while pretty much no human ever sends anything to the announce list. Hosting is from Darren (php4hosting) and Jonathan (Black Cat Networks). I've got the web site, but the contrib area is open to all (click "edit this page"). Probably there are others doing jobs and I apologise for not mentioning them by name.
All of this would welcome help, I think. If all of the people on this list did a little bit for ALUG, we would be blazing ahead. If you're not sure what needs doing, post a bit about the sort of thing you'd like to do and someone will give you ideas.