Talks and Schedule 2017-2018

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

Contents

• Goals
  • Talks
  • Events
• Talks People Want
• Talks People are Willing to Give
  • echarlie
  • telnoratti
  • pew
• Companies that may be willing to give talks
• Schedule: Fall 2017
  • September
  • October
  • November
  • December

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. Socializing can happen before meetings in the form of PMS.

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
  • Free food SHOULD (RFC 2119) be provided
  • Preference should be given to the more libre of companies, if possible
  • 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
    • Intro to mutt
    • Beginners guide to Ubuntu Mate
      • Talk about how to replace MS word with LO^WLaTeX, 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-members
  • 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/lightning talks 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
  • Setup luug infra
  • Setup Ubiquiti for Darknet
• 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)
• VT Hacks
• Gobblerfest
• SEC Engineering Week
• CEED O-Show for Galileo/Hypatia at the beginning of the year (generally weekend before classes)

Talks People are Willing to Give

Ideas for talks can be found here.

echarlie

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

telnoratti

• ZFS
• Linux and Unix Distro Sampler
• Grub2
• cgroups/LXC/docker
• Puppet
• timecube
• I/O Queuing
• Cults 101: Starting your first cult for fun and profit
• Cults 102: Advanced Culting Techniques

pew

• Linux security structure (how LSMs work)
• Ubertooth + demo
• mutt (alongside gmail)

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. SIMP looks cool and is primarily their project.
• 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 Facebook Talk? aam is point of contact for coordinating.
• 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?