Hi, all.
Yep, I think last night was very successful - we had eleven attendees that covered a wide variety of experience and OSs, ranging from the long-term, hardcore Slackware, Gentoo, Debian users down to us mere mortals running (K)ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Knoppix etc.
There was a lot of enthusiasm from around the table, and I think we've discussed a lot of things we'd like to try out incl. whether an additional web forum would take off, kit meet, bio/skills pages for members, "Ask iPlug" support question page, interactions with other LUGs/Groups, monthly challenges.
The important thing to remember is that nothing is "off the table". Even last night, some people thought some things would work, others disagreed - but once we have a flexible infrastructure up and running, I hope we'll be able to trial these ideas between meets and then discuss them to see whether they're working out or whether the trial should be extended or gracefully retired.
That said, the consensus last night seemed to me that a flexible wiki was a priority for us and, therefore, I'm going to go ahead and set that up before the next meet under the iPlug name (a branch of ALUG). I hope this doesn't come across as a an attempt to splinter the ALUG community, but I truly don't want to pile on pressure and deadlines to a community which, I'm sure, has been doing perfectly well on its own so far ... ;)
If ALUG moves towards the same open model at any point in the future, we can look at bringing iPlug back into the fold. That said, if it doesn't work out for us - we always have the option of falling back to the slightly more regulated ALUG-approach. Best of both worlds!
I hope this is the start of something which benefits all of ALUG - there's plenty of opportunity for collaboration across East Anglia and with regular meets in Norfolk and Suffolk, with any luck the numbers can only continue to grow!
Peter.