Re: Those IT guys are loony

Greg Madden wrote:
> On Friday 16 March 2007, Arthur Corliss wrote:
> snip
>> Look, there should be a hierarchal structure of users within a group,
>> consisting of different skill levels. The goal of any non-dead user
>> group should be not just to get more members, but to progress those
>> members to higher skill levels. That way you keep an energized
>> membership that's continually learning something new, and mentoring
>> those who arrived after them. And that energy and excitement about
>> harnessing technology (or even creating it) can lure on even more new
>> members.
>>
>> I'm sorry guys, but if everyone thinks that this group is fine with no
>> focus, no direction, no enticement for users to succeed (as users or
>> admins, hackers, etc.), then this group is already dead and beyond
>> resuscitation.
>
> I think if Arthur wants more direction or intellectual stimulization in
> Aklug he should help provide it. I am a user, myself, go to Friday Nite ,
> and from my perspective we have introduced many new people to Linux, and
> continue to do so.

It can't be one person doing it all, it will fail. Greg, if all you can
do is show up at the Friday nights and help people there then that is
all you can do, no need to feel like anyone is down on you. Anybody else
who feels like Greg has mentioned the same applies.

I have been thinking of some ideas we could try.

Pick a topic that is interesting and lets tear it apart as a group
working together and helping each other. Before we start we would need
to agree on what our final objective is, that way we have direction in
what we will learn.

We could do apache, where we setup a server that does virtual hosting
and then we secure the box with best practices, we also tweak our system
to give apache peak performance.

This could be the project of the month, all other questions and answers
and greetings and meetings would still go on in the list but for one
month we would all learn about apache. Next month we could tackle DNS
then mail then databases. It wouldn't have to just be applications,
different OSes we could also do, *BSDs, Solaris 10, QNX. We could do
themes, securing the network, kernel internals, shell one-liners and of
course perl one-liners and the dreaded...regular expression.

We wouldn't have to dedicate time we could do it over the list, when you
had the time to read the posts for that day or week you could catch up
or help to catch others up. We would then have questions and answers
going on for one topic that we would focus on.

Again, the regular questions would still be flowing on the list that
would not change, this would just be an added feature to our group
mailing list.

Now, I know I said I would keep quiet and let it go but I can't. There
is too much opportunity here and too many very smart people on this list
that have a lot to offer. It has to be enjoyable and flexible otherwise
it becomes a chore that no one wants to do.

What do you all think, do you have better ideas or something that will
work better? Do we want to try something like this and see how it goes?

Jon
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Received on Sat Mar 17 00:56:35 2007