[svlug] LUG picnic prospects (was: with heavy heart... and a sigh.)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Heather Stern (star at starshine.org):

[263 lines.  Wow.]

> I am not reading these threads.

OK, so a brief recap for others, because of misconceptions still being
repeated.  I assume no malice on Heather's part; she's very upset
and not tracking substantive points.  (I reserve getting upset for
important things like friends getting killed.  This doesn't rate.)

Overwroughtness may also explain points where Heather's posts have been
contradictory, e.g., where she'd say Sbay hasn't changed anything, and
then in the next post that its changes don't matter.  Anyhow, I had only
one simple point:  that Sbay had removed local LUGs from management of
their picnic without consultation, and that it'd be nice if the LUGs
would consider re-forming their picnic elsewhere.

> If Rick Moen wants to fork the Picnix he's welcome to spin up an
> olympic summer games or any other such thing he likes.  It can be
> all his, unless of course he's willing to share, and then something
> real might come of it.   But it will still contain the flaw of being
> owned instead of shared....

Misrepresentations, here.  Reminder:  At no point did I say I personally
wished to launch, let alone run, anything.  What I said was:  I think
it'd be a good idea for the Bay Area's Linux User Groups (too) to 
consider running a summer picnic, as they did before.

In that sense, it was Sbay that forked Picnix, in 2005:  They merely
kept the name while eviscerating process, and kept _mostly_ telling
volunteers they weren't changing anything.  Which lead a number of
old-timer volunteers including Drew Bertola, Alvin Oga, and me, to say
"Um, sorry, but that's just not true."

However, Sbay then-president Ian Kluft openly acknowledged that they
_had_ taken the picnic out of the Bay Area Linux user groups' hands
(which they did without consulting the LUGs, on that or other matters):
He said so quite frankly to Michael Cheselka during Sbay's 2006 picnic
-- the one in which SVLUG had participated on condition (which Sbay
violated) that things be restored, as before.

> I cannot respect [Rick] abusing my friends

I merely told the truth -- the same truth that Drew, Alvin, and even Ian
have.  Heather did not -- and the group she now heads has been, in
general, at considerable pains to not tell the truth to the Linux
community -- to the extent that they recently evicted and barred me
without notice from the linuxpicnic at linuxpicnic.org mailing list _and_
the announce at linuxpicnic.org mailing list.  Ironically, this was very 
explicitly for merely for telling that truth to people _here_:  I had
literally posted zippo, nada, rien du tout to linuxpicnic at linuxpicnic.org 
since October 20, 2006.

(Again, as I said to Brian J. Tarricone, all this stuff can be confirmed
objectively by anyone who actually cares.)

Doubly ironically, it turns out that this action was taken by Ian Kluft,
not by Heather Stern, in revenge for my saying in public (here) exactly
what IAN HIMSELF had said to Michael Cheselka at the 2006 picnic!  Here's   
the IRC snippet where he announced his action to Sbay's tight little
internal management group:

   <ko6yq-lt> Hmmm... I hear Rick M has accused me on the SVLUG list of
   kicking out all the Linux groups from the picnic.  As part of the effort
   to rescue the picnic from the demoralization he caused last year, I'm
   going to ban him from the picnic mail list.

Heather merely refused, as Sbay president and alleged co-listadmin, to
intervene, and then, when I noticed the undisclosed ban, invented a
stream of nonsensical and mutually contradictory post-hoc justifications
for a blatant personal backstab action contrary to Sbay's own posted
mailing list guidelines.

I trust I needn't belabour the lack of integrity and honesty -- but that 
highlights another reason LUGs may wish to consider re-creating their 
picnic:  Sbay lacks the management integrity to run the LUGs' event.  
How many _other_ subscribers have been silently banned?  Is Sbay going 
to start banning attendees Ian doesn't like from the picnic itself?  
They claim that right; they've lately had the ability.  We cannot really 
know, given their habit, so strikingly unlike the Linux community's, of 
confining nearly all information to private forums.


Do the LUGs have sufficient interest to run a picnic again?  I have no
idea.  My sense is that the 2000-2003 tech. collapse gutted them, as
jobs evaporated or moved to Portland/Seattle; they've never recovered.

But I think it's worth considering, which is why I mentioned it at all.