[SGVLUG] Meeting recap for Thu 1/9 + LUG plans

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

Highlights
* We had an excellent turnout--about 26 people.  
* Evaluated list of meeting options (http://bit.ly/1lFEEju); Alhambra Library and Burger Continental are best free options, but BC has advantage of beer and food during LUG and it's probably more spacious.  
* We will meet at BC for Feb (lightning talks) and Mar (OLPC talk).  You are not obligated to buy food in order to attend the meeting.  As long as the group as a whole orders food, we will be on good terms with BC.
* We will set up SGV Tech Meetup group as an umbrella group for SGVLUG, SGVHAK, Ubuntu Hour, etc.  This spreads the monetary and administrative load and the consortium will be more active than the individual groups.  James is handling collecting the money and setting up the meetup.

* We will participate in social media:  Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.  Richard will handle this with some help from James.  We want to automate some of the posting by having website updates trigger automated posting to the above.
* There was a strong interest in LUG BoF at SCaLE.   
* We will set up a Google group for LUG administration purposes.  We want a centralized place to compile LUG account info, etc.
* We will evaluate our social media efforts at the April meeting.
* People interested in volunteering for SCaLE A/V team should talk to Michael Proctor Smith. 
* Things to remember: 
   ** We need to identify several people who can bring projectors for a particular meeting.  We don't want a single point of failure if we really need the projector and the person who has it comes really late or can't come at all.
   ** We need extension cords and power strips, due to the location of the power outlets.  This is especially necessary to run the projector.  
   ** The wifi can be poor in sections of the room; particularly the area close to the presentation screen.  
   ** We need to work on the room layout so it works better for our presentation format, but we can still have dinner.

It was a very fun and productive LUG meeting.  It was nice seeing such a large turnout.  The venue worked out surprisingly well. BC has a new menu and they were really nice to us.  There was a real projector screen.  Acoustics was good when only a couple of people are speaking.  (It becomes a din when there are many conversations going.)   It's nice to have dinner at a reasonable hour.  Because of the tables and food, it was a lot more social during the whole meeting.  It was a lot easier to talk after the meeting because we could just gather around individual tables or in corners to speak in small groups.   

Big thanks to Richard for arranging the venue, to James for setting the agenda, Michael S. for making sure we went through the agenda and made decisions, and to everyone for participating.  And Sherri, who is our usual server for dinner, did a magnificent job handling the room and giving us some advice about the room layout.  

To make sure we make progress on the things we said we'd do, we'll report status at the monthly meetings.  For those volunteering or being dragooned into working on something, feel free to pass on the task to others if work or life overwhelms you.  It's important to keep the momentum going.

We decided to do lightning talks for February while we shake out our room issues.  These will be short 2-5 minute talks.

Richard will report status on social media effort
James will demonstrate how to update the SGVLUG website using Pelican and Github.
Doug will present something TBD
Jess will talk about GStreamer
John K. will present the history of open source
Michael S. will present something TBD

Lan
PS For those of you who still use IRC, join us on  #sgvlug and #sgvhak on Freenode.  There are only a few of us who converse regularly, but feel free to join in.
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