[AUUG-Talk]: Conference Update

[Leon Brooks]

On Tuesday 25 September 2007 12:26:37 Christopher Vance wrote:
> At the moment, we have a board of only four people, soon to
> be three. If members aren't willing to do some board time,
> things eventually peter out.

I'd be delighted to put in the actual _time_ but at the moment
I'm a disability pensioner, which makes things like travel or
even telephone time quite difficult to manage. IRC or email
is fine, as long as I have time to organise around it.

OTOH, if AUUG mostly needs a face in Tasmania for any
reason, then I can probably fill that slot.

As you pointed out below, AUUG is mostly a wrapper org
which is becoming limited to spaces not actively filled by
other org's. This is one reason why I poked my nose in when
a merger-of-sorts was proposed with LA.

LA has (guessing) a thousand or so members, which provides
enough warm bodies to fill seats in places like boards. While
LA's official Mandate (and name) is Linux, it has grown to
include other aspects of computing.

For example, PLUG (Perth Linux User Group) was effectively
acting as a kind of BSD user group for a while in its early days
simply because they (we) were the only people actually doing
anything in Perth. Likewise, we bounced off being an OpenOffice
support group for a while.

So I don't think adding AUUG to LA would harm LA at all, but
I do think that AUUG really needs to define who we/you are a
lot more clearly whether or not any merger-ish takes place.

Part of the reason for this would be for merger-ish movements,
so LA would first off not feel threatened, & second off would
have more of an idea about how to fill AUUG roles than they
(we/you) do now.

Part of the reason is that AUUG seem to lack (agreement on) an
actual purpose, & it looks like this itself is a big part of the
pressure to dissolve. It's not so much a matter of shooting in
the dark, as shooting with a blindfold on. Step Zero is to remove
the blindfold.

Cheers; Leon