[volunteers] Got a commitment from Cavium for meeting space.

[Rick Moen]

[Adding a CC to Volunteers, please note.  CC discussed further down.]

Quoting Kevin Dankwardt (kevin.dankwardt at gmail.com):

> I started working at Cavium a couple weeks ago and since then I've been
> working on getting a commitment for them to host our SVLUG meetings.
> 
> Today I got the go ahead to have meetings here in the cafeteria.
> 
> We can start with the Jan 4th meeting and we should be able to do it every
> month.

A minor point that needs to be clear to speakers:  If I'm guessing
right, the Cavium cafeteria won't have either an overhead projector nor
an Internet connection for speakers' benefit.  This should be clarified
to speakers.

A lack of an overhead projector (if I guess right) can be mostly
compensated for by an alert & reliable volunteer bringing a pretty-large
(21"?) LCD monitor to the meeting, and planning to plunk it down on a
table as high up as can be reasonably arranged.  Plus bring a power
strip, and maybe an extension cord, depending on room layout.

A further complication:  Need to let speakers know whether provided video
connections (if any) are VGA or HDMI or both.   When I advised one of
the early 2016 speakers that Symantec's overhead projector is VGA-only, he
was incredulous and said his Mac laptop had only HDMI.  I said 'What,
you haven't bought the converter cable?'  No, he hadn't, and he didn't
_want_ to buy one, either, because VGA is obsolete, march of progress,
blah blah blah.  So, I ended up sending him one of my own Mac-compatible
DisplayPort-to-VGA converter cables via USPS before the meeting, and he
gave it back to me at the end of his meeting.

Bit of a prima-donna, that guy.  But the point is, if I hadn't brought
this up with him, he'd have shown up with a MacBook Air and no means to
connect to the overhead -- even though http://www.svlug.org/meetings.php
says:

  Note to presenters: At present, we have no Internet connection in our
  meeting room, so please plan accordingly. If you will be giving a
  presentation using a Mac, please bring your own Mac > VGA adapter.
  Symantec does not provide these, and this is the one accessory Mac users
  forget to bring.

Basically, every speaker's going to bring a laptop, but some will have
HDMI-out only, some will have VGA-out only, some will have both.  Hell,
for all I know, maybe some speakers' laptops will have video-out limited
to some DVI variant, and that's another whole kettle of fish.  (There
are several variants with significant opportunities for 'Gee, I guess I
don't have that kind' problems.)

Many older LCD screens still have VGA-only input.  Some have DVI-I.
Some have both.  Probably other variants.


And a minor heads-up:  Traditionally when SVLUG starts using a new
meeting (or other event) site, someone puts together a new Web page
about the venue under http://www.svlug.org/directions/ such as
http://www.svlug.org/directions/symantec.php .

Note that the Symantec page includes:

o  street address / cross street, and city
o  static-image street map (that, if clicked on goes to a dynamic Google Map)
o  map of the exact location within Symantec's campus, with parking lots
     and walking path marked
o  directions by car, as approached from various directions
o  directions by CalTrain
o  directions by VTA light rail
o  directions by VTA bus
o  link to 511.org for 'Further Transit Info'.

It would be good to have a similar page, say,
http://www.svlug.org/directions/cavium.php, for the new venue.
(Hint, hint.)

A list of all of our surviving directions pages, to show what we've had
before:

rick at gruyere:~/www/directions$ ls  *.php
cisco-9.php  cisco-j.php  google.php  index.php  netscape-22.php
symantec.php  veritas.php  westin.php
rick at gruyere:~/www/directions$ 

The index.php turns out to be just a page that says 'No Index
Available', which is a bit odd, IMO.

The veritas.php page is, of course, an earlier version of symantec.php,
left over from the days when that building was Veritas HQ, before
Symantec bought the firm.

The cisco-j.php and cisco-9.php pages are ridiculously over-written, and
I should hasten to say not my work -- though I did tighten them up a bit
to make them a bit less wordy and less ridicuous.



> I am also putting out some requests for speakers.
> 
> So, a question for you is what is the atomic operation to decide on a
> speaker? Has it been up to you to make the official decision as to the
> speaker? I am concerned that in the changeover its not clear who decides on
> the speaker. So many details you took care of. Bless you.

The 'atomic operation's' not fully atomic, but is detailed below.  Decision's 
_not_ been up to me, nor up to any one specific person.  De-facto arrangement is:

1. Any person ('Volunteer A') is welcome to arrange a meeting (line up a
speaker for an upcoming meeting date).*  That person knows a date is
available by looking at the Upcoming Meetings schedule on the Web, on
http://www.svlug.org/meetings.php.  We always invited anyone and
everyone to do this step.

2. Having gotten a commitment from the speaker,  Volunteer A _or_ an
assisting member of the Web Team should update the schedule on the Web,
as described on http://www.svlug.org/teams/web-team.php :

  [...]  After each meeting, update the meetings.txt file, which is a source
  data file that is parsed by the meetings.php and prevmeet.php pages
  every time they load: Insert a new monthly listing like the existing
  ones below. (You may wish to copy and paste the template section and
  modify it.) If you don't know the speaker or subject, remove him/her
  from the page heading.  [...]

Something I should mention about meetings.txt that some people on the
Web Team have screwed up in the past:  Lisa Corsetti's design of that 
template file includes a line at the top that says "DATE: YYYY-MM-DD".
This field is crucial, and _needs to be set correctly_:  It's the date
upon which, starting at the end of day, this entry will be displayed on
the Previous Meetings page and not the Upcoming Meetings one.  It's an
expire-and-archive-this-entry date.

I've seen examples of where, instead of using the template section
(quoted below), a Web Team member copied/pasted a prior month's 
entry and updated the substantive content lines but forgot to change the 
DATE line -- resulting in an upcoming meeting shown only on the Previous
Meetings page.

(Need I mention, this is yet another reason to always, always, always
test-load any newly-edited page, preferably before exiting your text
editor?)


// :::: template for speaker blurbs ::::::::::::
// 
// DATE: YYYY-MM-DD
// <table cellpadding=5 cellspacing=0 border=1 width="90%">
//   <tr valign="top">
//     <th><font face="arial,helvetica">Date</font></th>
//     <th><font face="arial,helvetica">Location</font></th>
//     <th><font face="arial,helvetica">Speaker</font></th>
//   </tr>
//
//   <tr valign="top">
//     <td><font face="arial,helvetica">Month dd<sup><font size="-1">th</font></sup>, YYYY</font></td>
//     <td><font face="arial,helvetica"><a href="directions/symantec.php">Symantec
//     </a>, Mountain View</font></td>
//     <td><font face="arial,helvetica"><strong>Firstname Lastname,</strong><br>
//     Title, Company
//     </font>
//     </td>
//   </tr>
// 
//   <tr>
//    <td colspan="3">
//     <font face="arial,helvetica">
//     <strong>Topic:</strong> A One-Liner Suitable For the Front Page and Top
//     <br><br>
//     ============== Topic Abstract Goes Here ==================
//     </font>
//     </td>
//   </tr>
// 
//   <tr>
//     <td colspan="3">
//       <font face="arial,helvetica">
//       <strong>MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:</strong>
//       ============== Speaker Abstract/Bio Goes Here ============
//       </font>
//     </td>
//   </tr>
// </table>
//


3.  It's good form to also CC any correspondence with potential speakers to
the Volunteers mailing list, volunteers at lists.svlug.org .  This keeps
other volunteer in the loop, and reduces the chance of double-booking
meetings (i.e., as close to atomicity as we can reasonably get) -- which
obviously ain't been an actual problem.  Similiarly, if a potential
speaker replies but doesn't CC Volunteers (a commmon omission) even
though you did, you should forward his/her mail there, to compensate.

There's a gotcha with Volunteers as a public point of contact:  Like
pretty much all mailing lists in 2016, on account of the spam problem,
it's set to hold for listadmin review any mail received from any
non-subscribed poster.   In the general case, candidate speakers will
not be subscribed, so copies of mail to/from them will lodge in the
admin queue.  Listadmins need to notice that mail and approve it.  (An
alert listadmin, in handling the first such mail, would at the same time
check the checkbox to add the speaker's address to the cumulative roster
of non-subscribed addresses whose postings are nonetheless passsed
straight through to subscribers.)

Point is, someone needs to do that admin task, or the speaker's mail to
Volunteers will sit in that admin queue, and eventually expire and get
discarded, unless approved.


I would encourage posting/CCing/forwarding anything of
collective-knowledge importance to Volunteers.  I always did so, except
where something was too confidential to go to a publicly archived
mailing list.  Sometimes even in the latter cases, I would forward
something about the matter in question with anything sensitive redacted
out manually and replaced with something about '[redacted blah blah]'.

In theory, this helps ensure that all the other volunteers know how
things are done.  In practice, my efforts in that direction seem to have
been wasted because nobody bothered paying attention to what those posts
said.

In theory, this avoided the continally syndrome of people incessantly
just sending me an endless stream of private mails in order to deal wiht
'SVLUG', under the mistaken impression that I should be the single point
of contact for the group.  In fact, volunteers at lists.svlug.org ought to
be that contact point, really.

I am CCing volunteers at lists.svlug.org retroactively on this mail, for
that reason.


4. One of the many things I kept trying to remind people of via the
Volunteers mailing list is the TBA page, referenced on the main meetings
page (and also on the previous meetings page), right above the reminder
to Mac-heads to bring their VGA adapter, like so:

   Future Meetings

  Earlier meetings and more details are available on our previous meetings
  page. [link]
  Possible future meetings, yet to be scheduled, are listed on our TBA
  [link] page.

TBA page is:  http://www.svlug.org/tba.php

TBA page is intended as a place to put notes about people who are
possible future speakers or about non-lame topic ideas.  The idea is
that people trying to line up future meetings can/should mine that page
for ideas and suggestions.  As people on Volunteers or elsewhere made 
suggestions, members of the Web Team (well, basically just me) created
entries on the TBA page, ideally linking back to the mailing list post
where the suggestion got made.

Ideally, members of the Web Team should _also_ expunge TBA page entries
whenever (1) it becomes obvious an idea isn't going to pan out, or (2) 
we hold a meeting corresponding to the entry (removing that description
so we don't accidently try to hold the same meeting twice).  I would
swear that the TBA page is 100% up to date in that regard.  It would be
wise to cross-check its entries against the Previous Meetings page,
http://www.svlug.org/prevmeet.php .

Also, at a glance, I suspect that all the entries that suggest Jesse
Monroy as a speaker ought to be removed, because Jesse is now in west
Texas and only very rarely back in the Bay Area.

I don't think people have bothered to make use of the TBA page, no
matter how often I urged this.


* In theory, this creates the risk of someone booking an extremely odd,
inappropriate speaker/topic, or whatever, but, de-facto, whoever edits
the Upcoming Meetings page speaks for SVLUG.