[sf-lug] Linux Noisebridge events ... not going on

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):
> 
> > It should be noted that Sudo Room still has regularly scheduled
> > old-fashioned installfests.
> 
> I'll bet you knew where the Web presence for this was, but didn't bother
> to post it, right?  Thus my need to spend time searching, which
> eventually found the right page:
> https://sudoroom.org/events/categories/sudo-room-events/

I have some reservations.  This is _not_ your problem, but any
additional insight will be appreciated.

1.  https://sudoroom.org/events/categories/sudo-room-events/ and linked
event pages show five individual 'Linux Installfest Fridays'[1] at
exactly one-week intervals -- Friday evenings from 6 to 11pm.
_However_, there is no statement of intention to hold such events
regularly into the future weekly.  So, what _is_ the intention?  
Is anyone committing to anything?  Is this just mindless reposting by a
cron script?

2.  There are no names of the volunteers running the event, nor of any
group doing so, other than of course Sudo Room, which isn't running the
event, just providing a hackerspace inside Omni Commons.  This raises my
level of skepticism about this being a stable, ongoing event that I can
rely upon being real merely because a Web page claims it is.

3.  Past experience with people setting up _weekly_ periodicity for
local Linux events has been bad, e.g., it's one of the several
catastrophically bad decisions by CCSF LUG's president that immediately
killed that LUG, because the principal volunteers could not keep this
commitment, hence people kept coming to the announced meeting venue and
finding nobody there.  Once an attendee has come a significant distance
and surrendered part of an evening for an event that turns out not to
exist, it becomes difficult to convince the attendee even that the
_group_ actually still exists.

4.  Delving in the the sudo-discuss archives, I find lots of squirrely 
discussion about the 'Linux Installfest Fridays', e.g., they want to
flail around changing its name:
https://sudoroom.org/pipermail/sudo-discuss/2015-August/010930.html
...and, worse, _rotate_ them:
https://sudoroom.org/pipermail/sudo-discuss/2015-August/010945.html
...and 'Fridays have been kind of dead':
https://sudoroom.org/pipermail/sudo-discuss/2015-August/010855.html

Overall, one gets an impression of more than usual flakiness.






[1] Excuse me, that's actually 'Linux InstallFest Fridays!!!1'.