re-thinking LUGs and early planning for the first Canadian LUG summit

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi all.

First off, I want to apologize for my lateness in replying; I've been
swamped.

The quick summary is that I think David's idea is great and I will do
what I can to offer CLUE resources to make this happen.


David J Patrick wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 06:41:01PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 02:04:45PM -0500, David J Patrick wrote:
>>     
>>> PING !
>>>
>>> did this actually get out to the list ?
>>>       
>> I honestly don't know why people think someone in vancouver cares what a
>> LUG in toronto is doing.  For the most part they are only interesting to
>> the people in the local area.
>>     
That's part of the mandate, if all the LUGs want to do is engage in
technical self-help. I would suggest that community support and advocacy
should -- indeed I would argue it really needs to -- advance its tactics
and methods, just as the software itself has evolved.

Open source is not a novelty anymore in the world of serious IT. Most
people who care about computing are aware of what Linux and open source
are, even if that awareness is negative or dismissive. There is an
active commercially-driven movement against open source that did not
exist when it was under the radar. I would suggest that there is an
opportunity for the community to do important things to advance open
source that the Red Hats and IBMs of the world simply cannot do.


> Personally, I feel it's important to do what we can to try and get our
> governments to recognize and address issues like net-neutrality, the use of
> open standards, and real cost savings that could come from wider linux
> deployments. If we just sit on our hands, those decisions will simply be
> made by the loudest (and richest) lobbiasts. There are coMpanieS that would
> love to see a hard vendor lock-in at federal, provincial and municipal
> levels, and some pre-emptive actions would be prudent.
>   
Indeed.

Given that there are limited skills and limited resources amongst
advocates in non-technical areas, it is vital that information, tactics
and contacts be shared amongst LUGs. It could be very useful to TLUG to
know what the Victoria LUG is doing to convince the provincial
legislature to be more pro FOSS. At very least it could advocate a level
playing field and adoption of standards-based protocols for file formats
and web programming. Such advocacy efforts could be more easily done if
multiple advocates -- in Toronto, Halifax, Victoria, Edmonton etc. --
could pool skills and share the load since so much of the research and
grunt work could benefit all efforts.

If Lennart is right and most open source "advocates" can't (or don't
care to) see past their immediate circle, then that's a reality we may
need to deal with. Maybe LUGs will forever be little more than
personal-level self help, leaving it to vendors to do the lobbying and
advocacy. To me this would be a wasted opportunity, but I prefer to be
optimistic and hope that at least some segment of the community cares
about a bigger picture.

- Evan

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