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Paying for LUG Meeting Space?
Johann asks: "Our LUG has been fortunate to hold meetings for the past two years in a corporate-sponsored basement auditorium. The sponsor pays for us to use this room, which seats around 50-60 comfortably. We normally fill the room. We have an offer to move to a meeting room in a Radisson hotel at a highly-reduced rate. This room has many advantages over our current 'free' one, such as better handicapped and after-hours access, internet connectivity, better temperature control, and room for more people. The only problem: the members likely will have to bear the costs of this room ourselves. So, my question to other LUGs: Are you paying for your meeting space? If so, by what means? Donations? Sponsors? Passing-the-Hat? How have the members taken to paying for space?"
The Linux Users of Victoria currently have our venue donated by IBM. IBM have a Linux marketing manager (Katie Axam, we love you) who fielded our request for a venue.
The venue is amazing - its in the corporate headquarters of Telstra, out countries telecommunications monopoly. Its around three stories tall, and has a projection screen that's around two stories, radio mikes, and even video recording facilities - its amazing to speak at, If you know what you're going to talk about, you can simply walk around the stage talking to the audience and pointing at things on your presentation using your hands or a laser pointer if you want, because you're not tethered to your laptop - its simply feels a lot more natural. IBM even provide light refreshments before the meeting.
As a result, they've made 1300 Linux users, many of whom are professional network / systems administrators and coders, quite partial to IBM.
Previously, Melbourne University and Sun Micrososystems have provided venues.
The Portland, Oregon Biznix group meets at the local Novell office training room. It seats about 20-30 people. Biznix is ostensibly an all-flavors Unix support group, but proably 85%+ of the discussion centers on Linux.
This situation of strange bedfellows probably has a lot to do with the fact that the founder had also founded a Novell user group. The Novell group no longer exists, but the founder had a lot of credibility with the local Novel folks and is still on good terms with them.
I would have thought that's what most do. Paying for a meeting place? why do that when you could get a decent meeting location for free?
The linux users group in Memphis, GOLUM, holds most of its meetings at AutoZone's headquarters downtown. AutoZone donates the use of the conference room. There was also a meeting today at the local community college, who are kind enough to donate space in one of their labs for a couple of hours.
Of course it helps that employees from AutoZone and the college are members of the user group. If your group doesn't have any members with ties to corporations (aside from the current sponsor) or academia, you could always ask your local public library, if you have one. Many of them have meeting rooms which can be reserved for use by non-profit groups, or even by the public.
Our lug, MLUG or the Montreal Linux Users Group's venue is a room provided by a local college (Vanier) after hours to us free of charge. The downside to this is that even though they teach computer programs here, they won't give us access to the labs. What we used to have though, and when we dont hear from Vanier, is an office of one of our members which, though it accompanies less people, is fully equipped with ~15 computers, most of which run as thin clients to an LTSP server which provide all your basic internet needs and some other stuff as well. That worked out good for a while, but then people actually started showing up and we grew out of it :( So if any Montreal, Canada slashdotters here are looking for a cool lug to join, cruise down to our website and read up on the information. We also invite you to join our mailing list where we discuss Linux/Open-Source issues as well as group stuff.
unzip; strip; touch; grep; mount; fsck; yes; more; fsck; umount; make clean; sleep
The Bay Area LUG (www.balug.org) meets in a Chinese restaurant near downtown San Francisco, one of the most expensive places you can think of to find meeting space. I don't think the LUG pays anything. The trick is simple. The meeting has a speaker and Q&A session, followed by dinner. Typically 70 or so people come to the meeting, which is more customers than the restaurant would normally get on a weeknight, and the cost of dinner (a prefab concoction by the restaurant, not bad but nothing very fancy) is included in the $10 meeting fee, so the restaurant makes a nice profit that pays for letting the LUG use the space.