[ale] Local ALE meetings & Enhancing ALE (was Just Curious about Starting...)

[aaron]

I'm always up for helping ALE support more local area Linux meetings
and groups, though I think it makes much more sense to organize these
as extensions of the existing resources of ALE & other OSS groups
rather than duplicate efforts building separate islands. In fact,
with that in mind, I've spent several hours over the past few months
working to improve our outreach and presence with other Open Source
& GNU Linux groups and some of those seeds are starting take root.

So I think it would be great to have a regular ALE South meeting get
planted. All it would take is one or two people on the list who can
take charge of defining what they want the meeting to look like, set
up a regular venue and schedule, and follow through with the regular
chores (one to three hours per meeting has been my experience) of
organizing the discussion topics or presentations for each meeting.

I'm on board to help where ever I can to help make our existing web
and contact resources accessible to everyone with info to post and
to better utilize our Wordpress CMS. I've recently been updating our
contact links to other groups and would welcome other ideas.  I've
also put my name and info out front as a contact person for ALE and
have been fielding a few calls a week ever since -- I know we've
added a few new members through this and a couple of recent
conversations may even be leading to a venue solution for getting
the NorthEast meeting back on line!

The importance of offering a contact person and phone# on our
site was stressed in an article in the March 2009 issue of Linux
Format Magazine entitled "Spice Up Your LUG". Their suggestions and
info came from a round table of GNU Linux user group organizers and
there are other good ideas in the article that we could be taking
advantage of if we can find a few more ALE folks to contribute the
effort to support them.  (I have the article in PDF form and can
send it off list to interested parties).

If anyone is interested in becoming more involved and active
in expanding or improving ALE's support of GNU Linux Enthusiasts,
I'd like to see us get together for a (long overdue) brainstorming
and organizational meeting. I'm going to throw out Saturday,
March 28th, 1:00pm at TWAINS in Decatur as a possible meeting time
and venue, but if another time or location would promote better
attendance we can adjust.

Please contact me off list (best address arxaaron at gmail.com)
if you want to be more involved with ALE, would like to RSVP
about the org meeting, and/or would like to receive a PDF
of the "Spice up Your LUG" article.

peace
aaron
ALE Event Coordinator, Etc.







On 2009, Mar, 09, , at 10:00 PM, George Allen wrote:
> If it there is a possibility of ALE-South at Clayton State, I can
> probably generate some interest - earlier in the evening the better,
> but I know of 5 or so linux/asterisk/etc curious people at the IT Dept
> where I work.
>
> On 3/9/09, Vernard Martin <vernard at venger.net> wrote:
>> Jeff Lightner wrote:
>>> Looks like Clayton State College and University has an IT College  
>>> - maybe
>>> they'd be interested in hosting such a user group given they're  
>>> on the
>>> South side.
>>>
>> Might want to to long time ALE-er Byron Jeff as he is a faculty  
>> emmber
>> at CSU in the IT department.
>>
>>