[aclug-L] volunteers

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some thoughts in the wake of last night's meeting:

 1) There was some (I think inconclusive, although maybe I'm just
    hoping) discussion about organizational structure, membership,
    voting, etc. Someone needs to formalize some sort of proposal.
    (Let's face it, "Dictator for Life" doesn't cut it.)

    My own proto-proposal is simply that the "committee" should
    be thrown open to anyone who wants actively participate in
    it, and that "committee" discussions should be public. First
    one attempts to achieve consensus; only failing that do we
    fall back on voting (which raises the who-gets-to-vote issue).

    I also think there are at least three clear-cut roles that
    need to be filled:

     a) Someone to deal with high-level organizational matters.

     b) Someone to plan and run the meetings, events, etc.

     c) Someone to build and direct the website.

    These could, of course, be multiple people in each case;
    some people could take on multiple roles.

 2) The role I am interested in is building the software and
    directing the content for the website. (I hope that someone
    else can deal with the basic issues of hosting and sysadmin
    the website.) The approach I favor (and I'll write up more
    on this later) is to use a mix of existing and custom (new)
    software; the latter would be a proper software bazaar
    project; most of the content would be collected from users.
    My favorite software for this sort of website is OpenACS:

      http://www.openacs.org/

    OpenACS software tracks community members (log in, get a
    cookie); provides extensive support for community interests
    (news, forums, faq-builder, polls/surveys, classified ads,
    member pages); has flexible admin options; has support for
    programmed tutorials (it can step you through a tutorial,
    administer quizzes, and since it tracks members, keep your
    place across sessions; it can make suggestions based on
    what you've seen). OTOH, it needs some work to clean up,
    apply a nifty design, and hack in new features, and content
    like the FAQs needs human editing.

 3) I'd like to suggest that next Monday's meeting split into
    two groups (after some preliminaries), one for meetings and
    the other for website. (Website was largely ignored at last
    night's meeting.)

 4) The other point that bears repeating is that right now it
    is exceptionally important to show up at Monday's meeting,
    although any comments made on this list are most welcome.

-- 
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 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.tomhull.com/
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