Talks and Schedule 2017-2018

This is a place to organize talks and sketch out a schedule for VTLUUG in 2017

Contents

Goals

The general idea is to not have many Social Meetings, in order to keep up interest of membership, and make it worth people's time. Also, I don't want to be president next year, and no-one else does, either, so we need people to do stuff.

In general, we should have meetings every week; about half-an-hour should be dedicated to news, club updates, and business. The rest of the meeting (1 to 2 hours) should be dedicated to the talk.

Talks

I'd like to see us have 3 talks each month:

• 1 industry-sponsored/provided tech/recruiting talk
  • ideally, free food should be provided
  • aam's facebook talk in 2016 was good
  • Booz-Allen talk was also good
• 1 "beginners" or intro talk to some subject
  • e.g.
    • Intro to LaTeX
    • Intro to vimscript/vim
    • Beginners guide to Ubuntu Mate
      • Talk about how to replace MS word with LO, etc
  • These should be provided by members of the club
  • Perhaps put some effort into reaching out for the more beginner-friendly ones
  • Focus should be on free software rather than technologies (IPv6) or programming languages
• 1 "advanced" or project talk
  • These can be by members or alumni, but also by non-memembers
  • not expected to be free-software focused (although prefered)
  • btreecat's talk on UAV was a great example of this, as was nluther's discussion of his thesis project

Non-talk meetings, or Social Meetings should have a call-for-talks the week before, to get short presentations by members. Otherwise, they'll just be discussions of news, tech, and FOSS, or quick tutorials on things people ask questions about.

Events

I'd like to have at least 3 events during the semester (about 1 every month), outside of talks. These should be about free software, open data, or anything else interesting.

Ideas:

• Installfest (we already have 1 each semester)
• OSM Day (co-hosted with the Locations Club?)
• Keysigning Party
• Hackathons
• Some event advocating for free software or teaching people about it, in a context besides the Installfest
  • Mass protests of proprietary software usage on campus

We should also make an effort to attend events hosted by other entities, and have a table, like:

• SELF (CLT, summer), CarolinaCon (RDU, april/may), All Things Open (RDU, october)
• Gobblerfest
• SEC Engineering Week
• That thing for Galileo/Hypatia at the beginning of the year

Talks People are Willing to Give

echarlie

• Intro to GPG (alternately: PGP Sucks!)
• IPv6: A pep talk
• Building a router with OpenBSD
• Running a radio station with open source

Companies that may be willing to give talks

• Facebook -- aam is an alum who works here; lots of people came and got interviews from this
• OnyxPoint -- CEO asked echarlie when would be a good time to talk/recruit
• Booz-Allen had some folks come by to give talks last year
• Randy from the ITSO would give a talk if we asked him (this barely counts for this category)
• Rackspace maybe? They're local
• Get larger campus departments (e.g. VTTI/ECE) to give talks about their libre software usage

Schedule: Fall 2017

September

• 2017-09-07 Pre-gobbler/installfest planning meeting (off-campus)
• 2017-09-08 Gobblerfest
• 2017-09-10 Installfest (speculated)
• 2017-09-14 Some talk
• 2017-09-21 Industry Talk?
• 2017-09-28 Social Meeting

October

• 2017-10-05
• 2017-10-12
• 2017-10-19
• 2017-10-26

This would be a good month to have an OSM day; perhaps around the 14

I'd also like to have OnyxPoint in this month, if possible

November

• 2017-11-02
• 2017-11-09
• 2017-11-16
• 2017-11-30

Probably the month to have the keysigning, and thus a GPG talk

December

• 2017-12-07
• 2017-12-14 Reading Day; Social off-campus meeting?