MJR-mobile markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk wrote:

We've just counted up & we think we had 12 people. One install took place and there were at least 2 new faces. More when I get home!

Now home. It was nice to meet some new people (and remeet an old member!), but I think others who spent more time talking can comment in more details about what concerns people when they arrive at ALUG. Basically, I think we need to get our act together on a few fronts:

- Publicity/promotion - Planning meetings further ahead - Publicity/promotion - The Lending Library - Publicity coordination - Meeting formats - Freebies

Here are my ideas. What do you think about them?

PUBLICITY/PROMOTION

One pound buys you 20 photocopies these days. If you print 16 of my 3-to-a-page fliers and 4 A4 posters, you can leave two posters and two dozen fliers in two locations. That ain't bad... surely many people can think of two places to leave them. I'll make a wiki page for noting when and where we've leafletted, so that we don't duplicate too much. Libraries seem happy to help as long as you make clear that it's for a volunteer group. Some computer shops are LUG-friendly too.

PLANNING MEETINGS FURTHER AHEAD

We must try to always have three monthly meetings planned at any one time. For the people like me that are trying to find new venues, that's a little harsh, but tough. The growth of the LUG will have benefits like finding new people who can get us into new venues. Right now, we only have UEA 9th June planned (thanks David), so who's going to claim July and August, please? First to the wiki meetings list wins!

PUBLICITY/PROMOTION

This is really important, so here it is again. What other things can we do? We all get free papers and mostly the free papers have events listings in them. We should definitely get in the local free papers for the area of the meetings, but that's probably another task to drop on the hosts, as they live there and know their free papers. That's a bit of a shame, as the hosts do so much to help already, but I don't see another good solution.

Another local media idea is if we can get a proper press release together after a successful event. With the number of people with digital cameras etc, it should be not too difficult to do. First we need another large meeting of the scale of some of the ones around the first birthday, with over 20 at Syleham or vastly inflated figures at UEA. ;-)

THE LENDING LIBRARY

What happened to this? Presumably, we have some books lurking with David Freeman (or at least he knows where they are) still. There was talk of hooking a database up to the web and having a rudimentary book request system. Did it happen?

Failing that, O'Reilly sent a notebook this year. I'm starting to write book movements in there for now, I'll try to get it online and I'll see about stamping the new crop of books with the ALUG logo (just to remind people which copies are ours).

PUBLICITY COORDINATION

Yes, publicity is vital oxygen for a group like ours. It allows us to grow by getting new members in. As some of you know, I made a massively bungled attempt at getting Cam-LUG more involved in cooperating with ALUG. (Actually, I don't think I did so badly, but it didn't work out, so the overall effect is the same.) I still think that some sort of coordination with the activities of other groups is a good idea. For example, I know Peterborough LUG is currently running talks on databases (using PostgreSQL), and their meeting announcements will start appearing in ALUG Announce. I've started announcing some ALUG meetings on their list. I think others have done the same with Cam-LUG lists, although their archive looks a little dead just now. It would be nice to formalise these arrangements a bit more. I'll give it a crack with PLUG.

Probably ultimately ALUG will become an umbrella for smaller LUGs in the various parts of the region, as some of us discussed early on, when we've enough people to do more than one meeting a month and not get all us die-hards at each meeting. Vary it a little, with evening meetings, etc, so everyone can attend something. Yes, this seems a definite good idea to me. With less distance to travel to more frequent shorter meetings, more people will get involved. I want to avoid the "three people sat in a pub LUG" trap, though. Does this seem a good way forwards to others?

MEETING FORMATS

Following on from that, what format do we want meetings to take? Installfests and troubleshooting are all well and good, but it would be nice to have talks and demos on a more formal footing. That said, my past attempts at organising it have been comical failures. Someone else want a go?

FREEBIES

OK, we've been sent some freebies again. Books have been added to the library (more on that later) again. Other stuff (boxed distributions, posters, pins, stickers, t-shirts) is up for grabs, though. Is it OK if we continue to give these away, but if more than one person wants a particular item, the "winner" is picked by a random selection with all wanters equally probable to win? I'll add that to the FAQ if so.

Enough of this rambling. I want your comments. Flame on!

MJR