BCS Linux & Unix User Group
Volunteers Operational Meeting

Wednesday, May 24, 1995

The meeting began at 7:00 PM; we adjourned somewhere around 10:15.

Attendees:

• John Abreau / jabr@bcs.org
• Guy Bzibziak / guybz@world.std.com
• Bill White / bwhite@shore.net
• Barry Ryan / jbr@world.std.com
• Steffen Ullrich / cerlphr@teuse.com (spelling was unclear)
• Brian Bay / brian.bay@tbbs.bcs.org
• Michael Bushnell / mib@gnu.ai.mit.edu
• Phil Jensen / pjensen@csi.compuserve.com
• Richard Royston / aoi!richard@ulowell.uml.edu
• Rich Braun / richb@pioneer.ci.net
• Jerry Feldman / gaf@bcs.org
• Robert Luoma / luoma@bcs.org

Agenda was informal, mostly taken from the floor in the first ten minutes. Nobody officially took minutes, so I'm writing this up mostly from memory, assisted by my (somewhat sparse) notes.

FSF proposal

Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation came to our user group meeting on April 19, and talked at length for well over an hour, during which he urged us to rename the group to "Unix and GNU/Linux". Richard followed up on this in May via email, reiterating his desire for us to change our name.

We spent most of the first hour discussing the pro's and con's of changing the name. Michael Bushnell championed the proposal, explaining why RMS wanted this change. Jerry Feldman suggested changing our name to "Unix and Related Systems" as another alternative.

We took a straw vote on the proposal before moving on to other issues:

1. Linux & Unix / 6 votes
2. GNU/Linux / 1 vote
3. Unix & Related Systems / 1 vote

BCS PC BBS

Barry Ryan, of the BCS BBS Merger team, proposed that volunteers from our group help to put together a BBS system for BCS that would be based on a Linux OS.

Volunteer Jobs

We're looking for volunteers to take on a number of tasks, including the following:

• Schedule speakers and events
• M.C. the meetings
• Arrange for the equipment needed at each meeting, particularly some sort of video projection equipment
• Public Relations - get the word out about our meetings and events
• Write a meeting report each month for BCS Journal
• Get announcements into the BCS Calendar in time
• Teach at Linux/Unix classes
• Assist in getting BCS office onto the Internet
• Maintain a database of our group's members
• Coordinate with other related user groups:
  • ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
  • CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)
  • EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Clearinghouse)
  • GNHLUG (Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group)
  • NNEUUG (Northern New England Unix User Group)
  • BBLISA (Back Bay Large Installation System Administrators guild)
  • USENIX

As for the more technical volunteers, we can point them at the FSF list of volunteer jobs.

Speakers

A few people were suggested as possible speakers and topics:

• Galacticomm has ported MajorBBS to Linux
• Net.Genesis
• Win Trees can talk on Internet firewalls
• Michael Bushnell volunteered to do a presentation at our August meeting:
  • Emacs for Power Users
• Cygnus is a Free Software tech support service company
• BPL (Boston Public Library) is online - bobbie@bpl.org
• Computer Museum as a meeting site and as a source for topics/speakers

Someone expressed a desire that we return to a format where we hold a significant Q&A session at each meeting, in addition to our guest speakers.

Pentium Lab

The Resource Center has a classroom with 10 Pentium-75 workstations. We've reserved 10 InfoMagic CD-ROMs for running Linux on these systems to teach classes for our group. Volunteers are needed to implement the plan.

Social Events

Pot Luck Barbecue

We're planning a Pot Luck Barbecue for Saturday, August 5. Attendees will bring their own food and drink. We'll plan on starting the grill(s) somewhere around 2:00 PM. We'll have a box for Contributions to support the Linux/Unix group.

• Rich Braun will act as treasurer for this event
• Jerry Feldman will check BCS policies on, e.g., liability
• Guy Bzibziak will try to get a supply of "Mad Dog" bbq sauce

Someone was going to research some possible locations for the event; we decided it should be in the Boston/Cambridge area, and T accessible. I don't recall who was going to handle this.

CyberSmith and Liberty Cafe

These two places are "techie hangouts", kinda like "Cheers" with computers. We'd like to have a regular social event at these places, perhaps on the Saturdays following the main group meeting.

We'll plan the first event at CyberSmith for Saturday evening, June 24; if the space is already booked, we'll instead try to book Saturday evening, July 1.

Seminars

There are a number of places we can give seminars to raise revenue for our group.

• The Resource Center has a classroom with 10 Pentium systems
• "Virtually Wired" in Boston has a substantial lab in its basement
• CyberSmith and "Liberty Cafe" are other possible locations

Bill White has volunteered to conduct a seminar in August. We'll try to arrange this at Virtually Wired. We'll collect perhaps $20 per head, with a class size of maybe 10.

Note that the deadline for publiciizing in the BCS Calendar is June 15.

Tasks:

• Book space at Virtually Wired or elsewhere
• Prepare curriculum
• Prepare slides and a handout
• Public relations

Offline topics

Several issues had been discussed in the weeks prior to the meeting, but didn't come up in tonight's meeting. Among them:

Mission Statement

Rich Braun suggests we put together a mission statement for our group. The mission statement should affirm the fact that the Linux community is part of the GNU community, rather than a competing community.

BCS Linux CD-ROM

Several people have suggested that we put together our own CD-ROM, to help raise revenue for our group. Other merchandise could include T-shirts, bumper stickers, video tapes of meetings, etc.

Seeking corporate sponsors

We've been looking at the possibility of working with the BCS contacts at Lotus Development Corporation, to persuade them to become a corporate sponsor of the Wine project, which would enable Linux to run commercial software written for MS-Windows. Lotus could also use the Wine library to build native Linux applications.

This was mentioned briefly during the extensive discussion of RMS' name-change proposal.

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