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Linux Users of Victoria : When Leadership Falls Upon You
Last month Linux Users of Victoria received three nominations for President of the association, but all declined (all other positions on the committee were filled). Attending the meeting as the Public Officer, I was nominated from the floor and accepted on the grounds that somebody had to do it and I knew I could do it. LUV is an active organisation; it has a membership of more than 1500 (I have to find out why there is reported variation), active mailing lists, a main meeting every month with two speakers, and beginner's workshop every month with a speaker, a distributed library and so forth. Donna Benjamin, the immediate past President, gave an excellent summary of the last year's activities. So these were big shoes to fill; and it is different coming having such a position land upon you rather than coming to it with an agenda.
The first decision was to handball the position of Public Officer to Donna; it seemed a fair swap, after all she did state she wanted to engage with free software organisations rather than manage them - and she was the one who initially hinted broadly that I should take up the position of association president. Then there was the two Richard Stallman talks, at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. A thousand leaflets were distributed for the two events advertising both LUV and Software Freedom Day. That weekend was Software Freedom Day, where LUV had its own prominent stall. A few days later a community group of non-technical people wanted an article about Linux in their newsletter.
With previous memories of the endless struggle to ensure the two speakers per month and now with the addition of another speaker for beginner's workshops, I made that a priority. We now have speakers lined up for LUV-Main talks until May and LUV-Beginner's talks until April next year. After attendance at their monthly meeting we now have regular communication with a smaller local group, MLUG, after many years of separation. Following attendance with the City of Melbourne sponsored session we have security procedures for our Beginner's Workshops. Tuesday's main meeting was a success with two excellent talks, good conversation, and some forty people in attendance.
On the agenda is to establish a second regional chapter in Geelong with an install-fest and mini-conference, participation in the State Library's IT Enables: Life, Choice, Aspirations Event for the International Day of People with Disability. Finally, one of the more problematic issues (obvious from pure observation, confirmed by member surveys) is the very occasional flame-war. We now have more stringent posting guidelines to ensure that the mailing lists are friendly and helpful.
So it's been a very good first month I suppose. By sheer involvement a plan is formulating for increased membership, greater attendance at events, more regional chapters, and greater community involvement. It may be an accidental plan, but it is happening just the same. Finally, I really must thank all the other members of the committee. They have carried out allocated and initiated tasks efficiently, effectively and with very good spirit. The success of LUV this year will not be possible without their good work and that of the Public Officer. I cannot emphasise enough the good fortune of having such great people working together in a team...
The first decision was to handball the position of Public Officer to Donna; it seemed a fair swap, after all she did state she wanted to engage with free software organisations rather than manage them - and she was the one who initially hinted broadly that I should take up the position of association president. Then there was the two Richard Stallman talks, at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. A thousand leaflets were distributed for the two events advertising both LUV and Software Freedom Day. That weekend was Software Freedom Day, where LUV had its own prominent stall. A few days later a community group of non-technical people wanted an article about Linux in their newsletter.
With previous memories of the endless struggle to ensure the two speakers per month and now with the addition of another speaker for beginner's workshops, I made that a priority. We now have speakers lined up for LUV-Main talks until May and LUV-Beginner's talks until April next year. After attendance at their monthly meeting we now have regular communication with a smaller local group, MLUG, after many years of separation. Following attendance with the City of Melbourne sponsored session we have security procedures for our Beginner's Workshops. Tuesday's main meeting was a success with two excellent talks, good conversation, and some forty people in attendance.
On the agenda is to establish a second regional chapter in Geelong with an install-fest and mini-conference, participation in the State Library's IT Enables: Life, Choice, Aspirations Event for the International Day of People with Disability. Finally, one of the more problematic issues (obvious from pure observation, confirmed by member surveys) is the very occasional flame-war. We now have more stringent posting guidelines to ensure that the mailing lists are friendly and helpful.
So it's been a very good first month I suppose. By sheer involvement a plan is formulating for increased membership, greater attendance at events, more regional chapters, and greater community involvement. It may be an accidental plan, but it is happening just the same. Finally, I really must thank all the other members of the committee. They have carried out allocated and initiated tasks efficiently, effectively and with very good spirit. The success of LUV this year will not be possible without their good work and that of the Public Officer. I cannot emphasise enough the good fortune of having such great people working together in a team...
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Oh, and uh, congratulations! (Maybe its a consolation prize for losing the Unitarian election?)
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In all honesty the "look & feel" is really up to the individual tastes. By the sounds of it you're more familiar with KDE rather than GNOME, so Kubuntu might be what you're after (or maybe even Mint with is Ubuntu + all the codecs pre-installed).
More importantly is the webserver applications; Apache, PHP/Perl/Python & etc. That can be found on all distributions but you may find better support base with a larger distribution (again, I'm looking in the Kubuntu direction). Also you'll have to decide what sort of package management you prefer - for simplicity's sake many prefer the Debian-based aptitude package management (also found in Ubuntu) over Red Hat-based management.
Oh, and uh, congratulations! (Maybe its a consolation prize for losing the Unitarian election?)
More in reverse. At least here, being president of Linux Users of Victoria has more prestige, activities, membership and youth than Unitarians.. Which is something many of the latter don't seem to understand.
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