[ug-discuss] How do you reinvigorate a user group?

[Kjell Högström]

Hi Scott!

Scott Dickson wrote:
> After about  a year and a half, our OSUG in Atlanta is struggling, I 
> think.  We have always had a hard time getting the word out, getting 
> people to the meetings.  Some of that is geography.  The only place we 
> have found for our meetings is the Sun office, which is very 
> inconvenient for many folks.  Traffic in Atlanta is very bad and makes 
> it nearly impossible to get to our office for an after-hours meeting.

We tried with the Sun Office in Stockholm and have the same problem as 
you have. We are located outside of Stockholm. ten minutes walk from the 
subway end station and many thinks that is too far from central 
Stockholm. Last time we were able to get a more central meeting location 
and had the next biggest meeting.

> I've been thinking of some ideas and questions and wanted some feedback 
> on how to get things going again:
> 
>     * How successful have people been with meetings in the afternoon
>       rather than the evening?  Maybe a 4-5:30 meeting instead of 7-9PM
>       might be better.

I've done that in Gotheburg and that have worked quite well with 
attendance in the range of 25-40 people. We usually starts at 15:00 and 
ends at 17.30 (started so mostly because I want to be able to get a 
flight home the same night, but I think it works well). We try to have 
two topics and one of them usually in the next update so people can 
justify to spend some working time on the meeting.

>     * What about a conference bridge?  If people dial in a few times,
>       they might see the value of in-person visits and come.  We did a
>       bridge last time in order to include folks from engineering and a
>       few distant members used it to good advantage?

Not tried that, but I think that you need a room with a good telephone 
system if you are going to use it every time.

>     * How do I enlist the enthusiasm of the local SE and service
>       communities to drive interest in the people they deal with?

I think the best thing you can do is to talk with them, try to engage 
them for a presentation. And talk to their managers so people actually 
can get OpenSolaris in their official tasks.

>     * How can I get this to move to a member-sustained body rather than
>       a Scott-sustained body?

I'm fortunate to have one of the board members in Europen.se, kind of 
the Unix user group in Sweden and a USENIX affiliate, being the co 
founder of the Swedish user group. And now the rest of the board 
actually have started to take more interest in OpenSolaris. They 
arranged a Freenix conference last autumn which had one OpenSolaris 
track. So if you can find a local organization for Unix Users it may be 
a useful to try to cooperate with them.

>     * What else am I missing?
> 
> --SCott

/Kjell

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