[wellylug] Re: Formalising WellyLUG - revisited

Tony Booth Tony.Booth at treasury.govt.nz
Wed Jan 28 11:33:14 NZDT 2004


Sorry to reopen a tedious discussion that appeared nearly closed, but I
feel quite strongly that formalisation is not needed, and I think
discussion at the February meeting will not achieve clarity.  So here
goes...

I've seen too many organisations that are originally created with
members' interests in mind, but have devolved into cabals of committee
members or staff/administrators who have radical agendas or seek to
feather their own nests.  A formal structure, with all the hierarchy and
legalistic language inherent in that, provides the environment for these
people to gain a foothold.

I like WellyLUG simply because it is a chance to share my interest in
Linux and swap useful information.  I have limited interest in pushing
adoption by others, or in campaigning against various laws or
businesses.  I mean no offense to others who are very interested in
these things, but putting any sort of advocacy role into "law" through a
formal constitution would certainly put me off attending. I have
politics in my job every day, and it's nice to stay away from it in my
free time.

As far as I can tell, WellyLUG works nicely the way it is now.  Under
the current structure, there is nothing preventing us organising more
Installfests, seminars etc., or doing more "advertising" of our
existence if we want to.  We don't have the financial flows or assets to
require strict accounting or accountability, and not having a
constitution hasn't prevented us from getting donations of
venue/bandwidth etc. in the past.

If people who are handling the organisation of the LUG are unhappy about
the workload -- I know organisation has been more-or-less handled by
just a couple of people -- that is an issue we should discuss
separately.  I don't think it requires rules on a piece of paper to fix.
A call for volunteers perhaps?  I'd be happy to organise a meeting every
twelve months, say.

Cheers
TB

P.S. Getting back on topic for this list, I just replaced my last copy
of Windows with Linux.  I'm running Debian stable with KDE, and with
unstable versions of Mozilla and OpenOffice.  That it even works with
stable/unstable packages running together amazes me.

I've been impressed with the speed (it's only a Pentium 733 with 128Mb
of RAM), HD use (less than 1GB!) and hardware compatibility (only the TV
card is unsupported and I could fix that with a kernel recompile).  

I have had some problem getting Japanese input to work (my
significant-other has a need to read and write Japanese in OOo and
Mozilla).  Japanese seems to be okay now, but did take quite a bit of
work.  If anyone else has set up a system which basically runs in
English but allows Japanese input/output when required, I'd be
interested to hear how you did it.




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