User:Brian/magazine piece

From TynesideLUG

The nearest Linux group to my housemate Ray Glendenning and me in the summer of 1999 was the six month old North East LUG, which was based in Durham. We decided that something a little more local was desirable, and so we set about forming Tyneside Linux User Group. I believed the time to be ripe; Linux was gaining in popularity, so it would make sense to be able to get together with other users.

I began by researching other groups around the world. How had they started? What did they do? How formal were they? I found that in the UK, it was the done thing to announce one's intention to form a Linux user group on the usenet news group uk.comp.os.linux. The idea here is that I'd find out about any other people thinking about doing the same thing, and could avoid a duplication of effort. That post was sent to the newsgroup before I set off for work on Monday 28th June, 1999.

The response was fairly encouraging, so I made a web page on the space provided for me my dial-up ISP, and made a mailing list on eGroups.com before it got bought by one of today's big internet companies.

Our first meeting was upstairs in Costa Coffee on a very hot Sunday, the 11th of July 1999. Fifteen people turned up, which was to make it our biggest meeting for several years. Our meetings were on the second Sunday each month, and we met in coffee shops. We'd stay at a given shop until the manager would inevitably come along and ask us not to continue to use their premises. We bought lots of coffee, but apparently not enough. Fewer people showed up for meetings as time went on. Many of our initial attendees were from the neighbouring North East LUG.

Ray gradually lost interest in the group after we stopped sharing a house. My next flatmate, Christopher Burton, was interested and provided some real hosting on his very own server somewhere deep in London. About this time we also got a real domain name, courtesy of the folks at lug.org.uk. Still having practically no regular attendance, we decided to put our hands in our pockets and hire a meeting room for the LUG. We changed to Saturdays, too. After a series of very expensive bookings we decided to give that up. We'd rather be two bored Linux geeks in a coffee shop than two bored geeks in a posh meeting room, no matter how comfortable the chairs. At times we came close to giving up completely. It's incredibly demoralising to go for months on end without anybody coming along to meetings; had I been alone I probably wouldn't have stuck it out. There were plenty of people on the mailing list, but no activity, as Chris responded to one enquirer:

> Gad it's March, and this is the first post of the year so far. Just

> wondering if tynelug is still a going concern.

>

Well the list still works I was beginning to wonder ;)

The lack of "want" from the LUG is its demise.. if people want something

then it might be able to provide it, but at the moment we get hardly any

interest at meetings, minimal traffic on the mailing list.....so what

should we do.... (and this one has been asked many times before).

We went back to our first coffee shop, Costa, in 2003. This was about the time that attendance mysteriously picked up. The big drawback of Saturdays was that the city is crowded, primarily with coffee drinkers it seems. As it happens, somebody at one meeting mentioned that there was always space in the cafe of the Discovery Museum, even on Saturdays, and suggested that we give it a go. We did, and we stayed. It was perfect. Quiet, with friendly staff, cheap food and drink and lots of space. There were even power sockets, and the staff turned a blind eye to our using them. The group got busier and busier here, with our first really serious set of regular attendees.

In 2007, the inevitable happened. The cafe management was being given over to a franchise, who didn't want a bunch of geeks filling their empty tables once a month. The manager of the museum, Phil Robinson, came into our meeting, introduced himself, and gave us the bad news. Then he gave us some good news: He was intending to find us proper accommodation in the museum, to make up. This was unanticipated, and very, very welcome. After a couple of meetings in the corner of their public IT suite, phil asked us if we'd consider meeting on the first, rather than the second, Saturday each month. This coincided with a more-or-less permanent vacancy in the museum's classroom, where we have been meeting ever since.

At this time, we semi-formalised the running of the group itself. I was the de-facto guy in charge, since I'd founded the group and, for a few years, I had been hosting the group's web site and mailing lists on my own hardware. Whilst this was convenient, it made the group vulnerable to my leaving. Chris had moved down to London, and I realised that if the group was to really find its feet it needed leadership that wasn't tied to one person. A group of interested regulars got together and formed the Circle of Benevolent Dictators. We decided that it need not be any more formal than that. From the point of view of the membership at large and the museum, we'd be a single voice that made decisions on behalf of the group. Within the circle, it's a true anarchy, where we discuss and debate away, coming ot concensus, to serve the needs of the group.

Our relationship with the museum is still strong, and we've been offered the use of a new IT training suite, once they have finished building it. It's something that the Dictators are thinking about.

Ten years since we began, the Tyneside Linux User Group is very sound. It can and will survive if I leave. It's popular, and has a steady home. Attendance is steadily increasing, with new faces often to be seen. We celebrate our birthday each July with cake, and this year we even had our first ever birthday present, in the form of magazines from Linux Format. We've given presentations, and have even contributed to Super Mondays, which is a local open source advocacy group, formed by several diverse user groups in the area.

Humbly, I'd like to submit these tips for people thinking about starting, or trying to start, a Linux user group.

• Don't give up. Linux is big, and is growing. Your group can succeed.
• Don't do it alone. Just having one other person to come to meetings helps when it's quiet.
• Make use of lug.org.uk. Even if you don't want their hosting services, you can cadge a predictable domain name from them.
• Be predictable. Try to meet in the same place, at the same time, regularly.
• Keep your web site up to date. People assume that you will do this, and will assume you've gone stale if there are no updates.
• Never shut up. If your mailing list or forum has no traffic, make some. Announce meetings. Treat it like a blog if you must. Even if you feel like you're shouting into an empty room, the fact that you haven't given up makes others jump on board. Put posters up, or ask people to put them up for you (your library will probably love you for this - ours did). Don't let the world forget about your group!
• Once you're big, get others to help run the thing. You don't need to go formal. You don't need a constitution, and you don't necessarily need membership fees. For more information on how our group is structured, have a browse of the wiki on our web site.

Brian Ronald

Founding Member

Tyneside Linux User Group