ubuntu-us-wisconsin team mailing list archive

["Douglas A. Whitfield" <douglasawh@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 30 April 2016 at 19:50, Simon Quigley <tsimonq2@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello Ian,
>
> Ian Weisser said:
> >> We haven't done a lot in a while, [....]
> > This team has *never* done much. For several good reasons (worthy of a
> > different thread).
> >
> > And that's okay.
>
> This is a different thread. :)
>
> Could you elaborate on this so we can discuss it?


I think some of the issues mentioned are legit. There's no real way to get
around the spacial issues, unless people are willing to meet with other
groups when they travel. When I took over MadLUG, I went to the Kenosha LUG
and the MKE LUG to see how they did things and to try to figure out if we
could help each other. I never made it to the other Wisconsin groups. Of
course, a LUG has a larger audience, so it's not a direct parallel, but
certainly a similar audience.

For a while, MadLUG had Ubuntu Hours. I don't know if those are still
going. The closest I've lived in the last 5 years is Cincinnati, so I
haven't really kept up. The thing about Madison is if you get students that
are interested, groups can have a real spike. That's not to say
non-students didn't attend. I wasn't a student. It's just that the
fluctuations are caused primarily by students, I think.

Madison is great as a central location, because at least east-west it is
central, but north-south it is not, and as far as a population center it's
very much not the center. It's hard to get people from MKE/Kenosha to come
up to Madison, because they already have stuff. Thus, it would be my
suggestion to make Madison as comfortable for the "northerners" as
possible. For a while, MadLUG was at ITT which probably is about as easy as
possible for northerners since there is parking and it is on that side of
town. We tried a lot of things. We were on the west side, even Verona, and
that had its pluses, but not super-easy to get there from the Interstate.