First meeting

There were 8 of us that turned up at the Merchants Inn and after a little bit of wondering around everyone eventually found each other (personally i achived that by getting my brother to wear a debian t-shirt and hoping we got noticed which luckily worked). There was myself and my brother from Lutterworth and and a couple from the Coventry side of things i think but the rest were from Rugby and a few worked in Rugby using Linux as part of there Jobs. There was a nice variety of age and knowledge there as well which was good.

We decided the pub social worked well and to keep to that formula, so the general idea is to have a meeting a month and to alternate between technical and social meetings. The social meetings to be held at the merchants on a monday (but with some suggestions of being open to trying else where if suggestions are made) and the technical meetings to possibly be held at the Credative office (my spelling of the company name maybe wrong) on a different day of the week if possible for those with a standing commitment on mondays, we didn't confirm a day as we want to check it doesn't coincide with any other LUG meetings in the area. We discussed the various areas people have experience in which Nick has posted to the list so we have an idea of possible talks that people could be called upon todo as well as general conversation on what meetings and LUGs people have been to before.

Tim has (as he announced earlier) got the admin user account now for the mailing list and we decided as a group that he's done a good job so far and everyone was happy for him to carry on in a admin role for the group (i'm not sure how the finer points will work out and it may well end up being more of a joint leadership than 1 person doing all the admin work). He was planning to mail the appropriet LUG.org.uk group and ask for the website account details shortly as well. There was a photo taken of the group that night which hopefully will go on the site when it gets passed to Tim.

Last night went really well, in my opinion - a better turnout than I was hoping for, with eight people (from Rugby, Lutterworth and Warwick). We had more than three hours of pretty good conversation, finding out what everyone was interested in.

I noticed we have several people into Asterisk, a few into MythTV, a few into Perl... there was enough to talk about.

The consensus was that we could hold just one meeting a month at first (particularly because everyone will be busy with Christmas and the New Year), but this can be increased when we're up and running. We'll start off alternating pub and technical meetings (so next month's will be technical). We'll also try varying the day of the week that the meetings are on, to attempt not to leave anyone out.

So, the provisional date of the first technical meeting is 7:30pm on Tuesday 8th January 2008, so as not to clash with CovLUG.