[ILUG] [Fwd: Linux on TV3]

[Noel Carroll]

Thats a good post Donncha and it highlights a lot of stuff that a lot of us
didn't know before.  It does seem however that a lot of the bigger things
are being conentrated on while the smaller things are falling down.  The
most obvious one is the lack of a contact or focus point for the
comittee/ILUG as a whole on the site.  There are no recent minutes.  Anyone
looking at the site from the outside world would assume that the core of
ILUG was the list and that the ILUG was dying due to the amount of
irrelevent rubbish and uber tech on this.  Its been 2 years since any new
minutes were posted and there is no comittee list.   All you get is the
webteam contact.  Now we both know that that is yourself and Ken et al. but
an uninitiated browser wouldn't be privvy to this knowledge.  I'm of the
opinion that the new site has been a disaster from the content point of
view, while also being much more successful than the original aesthetically.
The fact that it didn't work on launch day didn't help matters either and
certainly doesn't present a good impression of the effectivness of the ILUG.
Please take these points as constructive criticism. I'm trying not to
personalise my comments in any way but I do believe that looking after
little details matter greatly.

Noel

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Donncha O Caoimh [mailto:donncha.ocaoimh at tradesignals.com]
> Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 11:17 AM
> To: Noel Carroll; ILUG
> Subject: Re: [ILUG] [Fwd: Linux on TV3]
> 
> 
> Yup, that would be me. I'm the PR person, but as with the rest of the
> committee I have a day job as well. We do what we can with 
> the resources
> we have. I've spent plenty of nights and lunchtimes and spare moments
> doing work on the linux.ie website as have other members of the
> committee and the admin staff. What many people haven't seen is the
> behind the scenes work that's been done on a web-based editor 
> by myself,
> Ken Guest, and others, or the huge amount of work being done by John
> Looney on Midgard.
> 
> The first I knew about the TV3 program was the email to the list, I
> don't watch much TV anymore, too bloody busy coding at night, and as
> with the rest of the committee I rely on others in the community. 
> When I do see opportunities for promoting Linux I take them, just last
> week I contacted Media Live in an attempt to have our site listed on
> their "top 40 Irish sites", it would have been in the late 20s because
> of the impressive amount of traffic we generate but the request was
> declined because we don't accept banner ads. I've spoken to 
> the CEOs of
> training and recruitment agencies who want to advertise on 
> our site, or
> at least get listed on the site but that's an idea that's not popular
> with many people. Still, we have/had ideas for such a section 
> that would
> be ranked by the visitors to the site. Of course, this has the obvious
> drawback that chances are nobody will use the thing except 
> the marketing
> staff in the companies. Nobody else will be interested. (scrap that!)
> 
> Marketing is a full time job. Lots of techies think it's simple, "oh,
> write up some stuff there on how good we are, use big words, cut and
> paste it from somewhere else", but even Dilbert recognised the
> importance of marketing staff in a cartoon a long time ago when he
> visted a company with a marketing department(mind you, the techies in
> that company jumped out the windows to escape the prospect of working
> with marketing!) Kenn, can you remember that one?
> 
> Part of the problem is a lack of communication. How many times have we
> heard people bemoan how off-topic this list has become? In fact, how
> interested would people be in discussing what we can do to make Linux
> more prominent in Ireland? I find myself having second thoughts before
> posting a mail to the list about anything not 100% technical, even
> though it might be 100% related to Linux. There have been flame-wars
> here over less. Last week a thread on the education at linux.ie list I
> suggested we look at why Linux is so successful in Mexico and Brazil
> (and now France, in schools, IIRC), and got one reply. People 
> have their
> own lives, and life in Ireland is hectic enough without worrying about
> some far off ideal that won't immediately affect our 
> comfortable working
> life.
> 
> Bit of a rant, I'm out of steam for the moment, back to work.
> 
> Donncha.
> ILUG PRO.
> 
> Noel Carroll wrote:
> > 
> > I thought there was a public representative or something 
> ont he committee to
> > take care of all of these kinda things and look out for 
> this kind of stuff
> > ahead of time and to act on it.  Doesn't look like 
> whoever's doing it is
> > doing much of a job.  I apologise if its you Donncha, but I 
> don't think it
> > was.  The site is so bad that you can't even find out the 
> members of the
> > comittee.  If I was a TV researcher the linux.ie site tells 
> me nothing.
> > Why can't the PR person on the comittee do their job?   If 
> you want a
> > figurehead comittee member, get a statue but as long as you 
> have someone
> > like that you aren't going to get exposure//
> > 
> > Noel
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Donncha O Caoimh [mailto:donncha.ocaoimh at tradesignals.com]
> > > Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2001 6:03 PM
> > > To: ILUG
> > > Subject: [ILUG] [Fwd: Linux on TV3]
> > >
> > >
> > > Hope this comes out as normal text, here's the reply I got
>