Berkeley TIP - Great 1st Meeting Success - Report

[john_re]

Contents:     Berkeley BSD / GNU-Linux Talks Installfeest Potluck (TIP)
1) June 7  - 1st Meeting - Summary
2) July 5 Saturday - Next (2nd) Meeting - Some preliminary info

=====
Hi everyone -  We had a great first meeting. 

Since people came from most of the LUG's & sw group mailing lists I
posted the first meeting announcement to,  
I just wanted to let you all know how the meeting went, 
and to give you a heads up awareness & 
invite you to our next meeting.

Next (2nd) Meeting:   July 5 Saturday, 10AM-6PM, Berkeley 


=====  First Berkeley - TIP Meeting Summary/Report
We had a fantastic first meeting.

I created this event as an unpaid, unreimbursed,
"volunteer for the community" effort, 
in my part time, on very short notice, on my own, 
without any assistance, with no $ but that out of my pocket,
when I have a number of primary responsibilities & 
other things to do with my time. 

In less than 2.5 weeks
we went from non existence
to having 12 people attending
from as far as Sacramento & Pleasanton,
75% of the announcements going out and
60% attendees coming with only about 24 hours advance notice -
the BSD / GNU-Linux attendees are very capable people.

Thanks to the preparedness, effort & enginuity of the attendees
we had electric power, networking & net access.

We enjoyed conversations,
people doing installs & system improvements,
a beautiful summer veranda afternoon at UCB's Free Speech Cafe,
and discussion, idea input, & improving suggestions
  for next month's meeting.

My personal hopes & goals before the meeting had been:
1 person besides me attend = that would be a success.
4 people attend = fantastic success
10 people attend = flabbergasting success.

I posted a note on the mailing list 12 hours before the meeting with the
latest details.

14 people came for the meeting.
The first one apparently didn't find the open building entrances,
and didn't meet the second arrival,
and both left before the third attendee arrived at 12:40 PM,
for a meeting I had announced as running from 12N - 6PM.

The third person had plugged his laptop into an outlet in the hall 
& was hard at work on his actual work when I arrived about 12:50PM.
About another 5 people arrived in about the next 15 minutes.
Several more in the next 20 minutes.
The rest scattered throughout the next several hours.

One of our attendees, a CS grad student, from Sacramento,
is working on a Google Summer of Code project,
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ossim/about.html
and gave a us a 4 minute mini talk about that project.

Our youngest attendee was a high school senior & GNU-Linux enthusiast
from Pleasanton, who came with his father, an EE who had attended
UCBerkeley.
He was also the first person to offer to give a talk at a future
meeting,
on the Digital Mars D Programming Language.
[UCB needs to offer this guy a scholarship quick!]

Our oldest attendee was a retired phycist who described himself as
currently a hobbyist & volunteer sysadmin for various non-profit
organizations.

We had the following attendees who heard about the meeting from these
groups, and came from these cities:
Bay Area Debian 2  Moraga, ??
Bay Python      1  San Francisco
NBLUG           1  Berkeley
SVLUG           3  Plesanton, Hollister
LUGOD           1  Sacramento
UCBOCF          1  Berkeley
BUUG            4  2 Berkeley, Concord?, ??, Oakland

The two attendees who arrived & left before I arrived came from SVLUG &
BUUG/BAD list announcements.

Probabilistic prior RSVP % attendance was ~5??
Actual arrivals = 14
Prob Multiplier = 2.75??

I encouraged everyone who came from out of town 
to post carpool notices to their local groups for the next meeting,
to save gas, save $, enjoy conversation on the trip to & from, & make it
easier for others to attend.

For the July 5 Saturday meeting next month there will be closer to 30
days notice, to allow much more time for arranging for carpools &
advance planning.

We had 1 high school senior, 2 undergrads, one grad student, one to be
grad student.

We had academic backgrounds: CS, EE, Linguistics, BioInformatics,
Physics, Math, that I remember.

We had at least two consulting programmers or internet infrastructure
developers, and many systems administrators, and several hobbyists.

potluck - 2 people, 3rd later suggested order pizza & probably doesn't
know he has come up with an idea that LUGOD uses at their installfests.

The president of SacLUG saw my notice on LUGOD & forwarded it to SacLUG
- thank you.

Two people came for installfest help & got it - one for X windows
config, another for Ubuntu? install help.

We didn't even get started on my goal of establishing a test video
stream.

Several people posted meeting summary & feedback on BUUG & SVLUG. 
That's great - thank you.  
If everyone would post a short summary of this meeting announcement to
their group's mailing list, that would be fantastic - maybe it would
encourage others from that group to attend in July, & raise carpool
awareness.

I wish to thank everyone for attending & contributing, the mailing list
maintainers where I posted announcements, & extra thanks to Michael
Paoli for cleanup help!

===== June 5 Saturday - 2nd Meeting B-TIP - Preliminary
Announcement/Info =======

Meet probably at UCB Berkeley, 10AM - 6PM, Evans Hall.
Installfest, Talks, Potluck, ProgrammingParty

New: ProgrammingParty
New: Simultaneous events around the Americas,
New: Technical talk video download & maybe streaming
New: Bring microphone headset & laptop 
       & VOIP & IRC w/ attendees at other locations.

===== Goals:

TALKS: Tom Belote from Untangle has passed word he could talk about
Backups. Scheduling in process - Probably for August meeting.

Audio/Video streaming of talk to other simultaneous/parallel group
meetings.

Announcements need to go out to US LUGs BSDs Unix & programming &
??other groups encouraging them to set up simultaneous/parallel meetings
in their cities for reception of live talk video stream.  

=====
Hope you can attend this Saturday, July 5.
I'll post an actual meeting announcement for that soon.