[volunteers] Speaker for Jan 4th SVLUG meeting?

[kevin dankwardt]

I reached out to a colleague at the Linux Foundation asking him to
recommend some folks to give talks at SVLUG.

What do folks think about the following list? I will reach out to any of
them and ask about the Jan 4th meeting.

-kevin

Sven-Thorson Dietrich, kernel developer/systems architect at Brocade
thebigcorporation at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebigcorporation



Dan Cauchy, General Manager, Automotive Grade Linux
dcauchy at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcauchy



Mike Eager, Principal, Eager Consulting, embedded Linux expert and DWARF
maintainer
eager at eagercon.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeleager



Nithya Ruff, head of OSS program office at SanDisk and Linux Foundation
Board Member
nithya.ruff at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithyaruff



Guy Martin, open source community strategist, Autodesk
guy.w.martin at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guywmartin


On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> [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.
>



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