[Speakers] Regarding upcoming scheduled SVLUG speakers

[Bill Kendrick]

So, since we're on the topic of 'sales vs. tech' presentations, I figured
I'd spend a moment going through the current round-up of speakers, to see
what people think of them...

April - Donald Becker, Penguin Computing, Linux Clustering
  Don's CTO of Penguin, and worked on Beowulf and at NASA.
  I'm guessing this should be nice and technical.

May - David B Allen, Windows to Linux Migration Roadmap
  David wrote a book on the subject.  'speakers' list members seemed
  divided on whether we should accept his offer to speak.
  My initial concern was that maybe he was just coming to sell copies of
  his book, but someone on the 'speakers' list (Bill Ward? I forget) said
  that they knew him, or had seem him speak, or something, and that it should
  be fine.

June - Speaker from OSDL
  No idea what's up with this.  I need to go back and confirm or cancel this.

July - Atul Tulshibagwale, Trustgenix, Federated Identity Management
  We just discussed this one on the 'officers' list.
  I think we should be fine, but some folks have some concern...

August - Christian Hammond, GNUpdate & Gaim, Galago, desktop notifications, IM
  J. Paul and I both know Christian.  He's just an OSS developer geek like us,
  and will be talking about OSS projects.

September - Kyle Rankin, Knoppix Tech. Talk
  Kyle is president of NBLUG, and has spoke there and at LUGOD, and people
  have thoroughly enjoyed his presentations.  He did happen to write a book
  ("Knoppix Hacks") for O'Reilly, but he'll be here to talk tech, not sell
  books.

October - Open Vote Foundation and/or BlackBoxVoting.org
  These guys spoke at LUGOD recently.  Both speakers were kinda... quirky...
  but they're non-profit folks working on important issues, so this should
  be fine, too.



As with my experience as speaker coordinator for LUGOD, the folks we
invite are typically FAR less concern than the folks who contact us to see
if they can come speak.

Should we perhaps make it a rule to not accept solicitations without some
sort of [mailing list] member voting process?  (As for speakers I/we go out
and find outselves, I/we can just accept the lashings from the audience after
bad talks. ;^) )


-bill!