[NTLUG:Discuss] NTLUG veterans helping Linux newbies?

[Steve Baker]

Kendall Clark wrote:

> This is the damnable tension however: veterans want more veteran stuff
> (but don't *need* it); newbies *need* more newbie stuff and can't
> really function too well w/out it.

And when the veterans go hard at the deep stuff, they scare off the newbies,
and when the *flood* of mail that 300 nebies can generate hits the list,
the veterans (who spend FAR to much time reading email as it is) will simple
unsubscribe.
 
> It's just a very hard thing to get right. Very hard as in 'practically
> impossible'.

Yep.
 
>     Jonathan> OK, actually there are 2 thing that I would
>     Jonathan> say. Secondly, us all being fans of open source
>     Jonathan> software, I'd like to know what kind of projects the
>     Jonathan> members are involved in, and possibly have NTLUG
>     Jonathan> sponsored projects.
> 
> Sure. We've done that before. NTLUG hosted The Casbah Project
> (http://www.casbah.org) for a long time before it got its own
> home. Chris uses NTLUG to distribute his Impress tool.

But with services like SourceForge, there is little need for that
anymore.

There is no real reason these days for people to develop software
with people who live nearby.  One of the projects I work on has
people from Germany, Australia and Brazil working on it...and that's
with just 8 people working it.  Why would I want to restrict myself
to developers from North Texas? 

The *only* reason to have a user group that's tied to some chunk
of real-world geography is so that people can meet face-to-face.

The reason traffic on NTLUG-discuss is low is that there are ALWAYS
better places to ask questions that aren't about when and where the
next meeting is!  If you have an OpenGL question, you can ask it
on either of two newsgroups - several vendor-specific lists - the
OpenGL games developers list, etc, etc.  Why the heck would I ask
a bunch of random Linux people just because they happen to live
within 50 miles of me?



-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)