Today the St. Cloud Area Linux Users Group (scaLUG) had it's first real meeting in about 2 years. We figured out that this is scaLUG v4.0. The LUG has come and gone over the years and a few of us have been through this a couple times so we are a bit cautious of investing a lot of time, our current numbers being low does not help this. Our numbers will improve as time goes on but getting there is discouraging.

We are meeting at the "New" Great River Regional Library here in St. Cloud. It is a nice facility for us, things for our families to do while we meet. There is free wifi in the building and three nice well equiped meeting rooms that can be used for no charge.

In attendance were Myself, Mike Demars, David Sundquist, Adam Barthelemy, Steve Williams, Tom Cross, Callum Lerwick and Lee Lorentz. We discussed the meeting frequency, location and time. Talked a bit about topic ideas and came up with a few to get us started. An issue that we have had open for a long time is our website and domain name. We have been using scalug.us domain ever since our .org domain was picked up by a squatter years ago. The .org is again available we agreed to use club funds we have from donations made to scaLUG v3.0. We talked about site content and it was agreed that we should go with a CMS solution so "web bastard" duties do not fall on the shoulders of one or two people as they have in the past. The only idea brought forward was Zikula, this is the CMS that Fedora Docs is deploying. I have only looked at it lightly, I hope to get a demo deployed this weekend to make sure it will fit our needs and not be too overwhelming.

We have committed to having a topic meeting the first Saturday in March and April, the topic for the April has been set, Tom Cross will be pimping Trixbox/Asterisk and general VoIP. Tom was the founder of the LUG when it first started and has been a great mentor for many in the community, I look forward to his presentation he always does a great job of getting people interested and fired up. The March meeting the ball is in my court, not sure what I am going to do yet. I have kicked around the idea of "Packaging with RPM and Becoming a Fedora Contributor."

If you have other suggestions for topics please let me know them it would be nice to hear what other LUGs are doing to keep users interested and educated.

Bob

Living in a place called by some Minnesnowda you would think being born here I would be used to weather changes, yet I still find myself a bit off guard when winter is here. From Jan 1-Jan 30 we did not get over 0c in the entire month, many days were -15c or colder for the high temperature, we did come very close to -40 where all men are equal a couple days, Jan 31 has signalled the end of winter... 6c. I nearly had to break out my short pants and flip flops. Yes I am exaggerating that it is the end of winter but it sure felt like it today. I am actually looking forward to another two and a half months of snow after this little break from the frozen air and weather. 

I have been a member of my local LUG for over 9 years. We used the LUG as a way to learn, to get help from those with more experience. It has had hills and valleys over the years when it comes to participation. Could it be that Linux is just to easy for the average geek these days, they don't need help? After a period of inactivity we started having a monthly meetings a while ago, Just getting together lunch really, once upon a time we had 6 meetings and lunches a month. We are looking at getting topic meetings going like we had in the "old days," we talked about things like setting up MythTV, (heck the local big box store could not keep tuner cards on the shelves for about 6 months after that) ssh tunneling, setting up LDAP, VPNs, it was a lot of fun. Hope we can get back there.

I am blogging about this to get ideas from other LUGs to see how they keep members interested or how they have revived a DeadLUG.

Thanks, Bob