WPLUG and BarCamp Pittsburgh

Yesterday i went to my first meeting of the Western Pennsylvania LUG. After that, we held a small BarCamp at the same location. A few hilights.

Up until recently, the WPLUG meetings and events were held on the CMU campus. For a number of reasons, they were forced to find a new location to use. Without going into details, the problem is that CMU is not set up to host community related activities that are at best tangential to what CMU teaches. The level of bureaucracy was too much, and thus, they needed a new location. For the next two months, events are going to be held at the Wilkingsburg School Community Center, a location much better suited to "Community". One theme of conversation was how the LUG could help support the Center by improving the infrastructure, or at least providing wireless internet for the whole building.

It seems there's a very quiet Fedora community in the area, that so far has gone unnoticed. I was asked by a couple of people about what we (Fedora and Red Hat) can do to help support and build up the community. On the same thread, one person 'complained' about giving out Ubuntu media when he doesn't use or support Ubuntu. In the next few months, we will definitely be trying to mobilize the community here, and perhaps train a couple of people to become Ambassadors. In the same vein, there are a few people who want to better support Fedora at install fests. This means a nice NAS system running cobbler that we can use to image machines at parties and meetups with Fedora.

I talked with the guys who are interested in doing BarCamps and other meetups like this in the area. I also brought up the idea of starting up an OpenStreetMap user group. I think we're going to have to plan something once a month in order to gain momentum. There are a number of groups we can lobby in the area to start participating in both events. It should be interesting to see what we can do with this.

It snowed, and none too soon. I managed to grow out a full beard leading up to this, and it's been keeping me nicely warm :). Also, it seems i can make quite good Glögg, which is a swedish variant of mulled wine. These lethal combination of wine, port, brandy, spices and sugar will keep you warm when trekking home up and down the Pittsburgh hills late at night when it's -7 degrees (Celsius, aka 19.4 Fahrenheit) outside.

2 flames:

Daria Brashear zei

You going to be coming to the OSM party this weekend?

Yankee zei

yes :)