[KLUG Advocacy] Newsforge: Do LUGs still matter?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 09:49 +0000, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> IMO this article is very weak; 

It is newsforge, so that is to be expected.  The editorial control of
these sites has dropped off precipitously in the past couple of years;
a pretty good percentage of the articles are either ancedotes or heavily
biased rants.

> it is strogly anecdotal and fails to deal with
> the issue in general. Somehow this does not stop the author from making some
> conclusions which may only apply to his esperience with LUGs. I encourage
> anyone on this list to read the article, and continue on to the comments 

Yep, some of the comments are the best part.

> (at
> least one of which is comparable in length to the original article).

I thought it was interesting that KLUG seems to not experience what he
describes.  We may have a higher percentage of non-professionals than
two years ago,  and the participation of those members is increasing.
But the nature of the topics discussed and presented does seem to have
changed, the "how to get this to work" type presentations are certainly
focused to more advanced topics;  because the simple stuff all works, or
because that is the presenters we have?

>  However,
> the notion that one can really learn something about the general state of LUgs
> or their ongoing relevance from this article is laughable.

Sure.

> >Newsforge has published an article -
> >http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/12/23/193238&from=rss -
> >entitled "Do LUGs still matter?".  It contains some tired crap like "geeks seem
> >to have fewer social skills than the normal populace" but otherwise reflects the
> >change in LUGs over the years.  The author seems to think the change in LUG
> >membership demographics he has seen as a negative (which I'm not sure I agree
> >with).  But it is an interesting question, and some of the comments are quite
> >amusing.

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