Meeting Agendas and Organization

["Burke, Jason" <JBurke@lrs.com>]

Hey Steve,

I'm going to take Kara's advice on this topic and post it
to the list instead of sending it to you directly. The following
are my suggestions for improving our meetings, and making
them more productive.

One of the main reasons for this is because I had a chance
to talk to someone who attended one of our meetings for the
first time last month (unfortunately I was sick otherwise I 
would have been there as well), and, I'm sorry to say, his 
comments were very negative. His main complaint was that
the meeting didn't seem to have much direction, and he 
wasn't very interested in the topic at hand either.

Hot on the heels of this impromptu meeting was the article
on Linux.com by Deepak which talked about how to organize
your meetings better (which by the way was a fantastic
article, maybe Kara can dig it up for us and post it to the list).

I think it's time for us to start taking these factors into 
consideration. Let's take our next meeting for example,
I remember reading in someone's post that we were
going to be talking about ALS which I'm all for, but do
we really need to take the whole two hours to talk about
ALS? And for the new people getting involved in the
group does that topic even have any meaning to them
at all?

I would like to purpose that we start publishing our meeting
agenda on the web site, and that we cover two topics during
each session. Here's a visual on what I mean with the written
agendas:

LUCI MEETING AGENDA for 10/26/1999
----------------------------------------------------------

7:00 - 7:10	Call the meeting to order, welcome new 
		attendees, and give quick announcements.

7:10 - 7:30	Q&A session.

7:30 - 8:00	First topic. I recommend that the first topic
		should be simple for the beginners.

8:00 - 8:15	Break & Social session. I recommend that 
		we consider bringing in refreshments and
		snacks. Also, we can do give aways at this
		time.

8:15 - 9:00	Second topic. This one should be for the
		advanced users.

9:00 - 9:05	End meeting.

I think if we implement this type of schedule we'll be much 
more effective at disseminating our information. Also, I don't
have any problems bringing in a batch of cookies and some
soda (or coffee, or tea ??), and I doubt that anyone else will
either.

I think that some more organization will only help us and 
make the group more interesting and popular. Let me know
what you think (and I'll extend that invitation to everyone
else on the list). 

Jason


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