TLUG's value to community ???

[John Macdonald]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 04:15:04PM -0400, billt-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > 
> > But this whole discussion is about the fact that TLUG has
> > not issued a charter to GTALUG to manage this group and is
> > asking to be conviced that there is value in your so doing.
> > TLUG has been getting along just fine without being managed.
> > 
> You are correct, what GTALUG should do is shut this list down completely, and require any interested parties to rejoin a new mailing list. This shouldn't be very hard to do, since the people operating this list are the excutive of GTALUG. Stay tuned. I personally think this is a good idea and will bring this up at the next board meeting.

And that is supposed to convince me that GTALUG is psoviding
a useful service worth paying subscription fees?  This looks
more like extortion than a discussion of merit.  Perhaps you
should find a competant public relations officer to go with the
rest of the incorporate trappings - you are not doing a good
job here.  You've gone from refusing to provide justification,
to threatening to take my ball to your home.

How about you instead ask that a second mailing list get
created, restricted to people who acknowledge your authority,
and see whether people move from this group voluntarily.
I suspect that you'll get a fairly large number subsribe,
but that they'll remain subscribed to this group and it
will continue to provide the most important focus of Linux
discussion.  If you provide inspiration that captures people's
interst and justifies the fess and organizational overhead,
then the focus will switch to the new list and the old one
will fade away.

As far as I am concerned, the most valuable purpose of this
group is to provide support for Linux at a local community
level, and the mailing list and monthly meetings do an excellent
job of that without any need for fees or formal organization.
You're trying to convince me that fees and formal organization
by saying that you'll take away the mailig list unless I agree
to whatever you want.  So, you've gone from providing an extra
feature to TLG that I don't see any value in, to removing
items that I do see value in.

Off-hand, I doubt that Drew will shut this list down, but if
that happens you will have lost the forum in which to convince
me (and presumeably many others) that your group is worth
joining.  This discussion does not provide the impression of a
group that *wants* people to join and get involved.  Personally,
I've been running Linux for 8 years (and other flavours of Unix
systems for decades before that) and have been involved on this
mailing list for much of those 7 or 8 years and occassionally
gone to monthly meetings of either TLUG or NewTLUG (a few times
per year - whenever the topic was of special interest and I was
able to go).  I'd hate to be shut out because of an impression
that a small group has taken over and changed the direction
and ruined the original meaning.  Please work on your public
image here - you've made a mess of the presentation so far.

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