[ubuntu-us-mi] USA Midwest Ubucon?

[Anthony Hall]

Hi all! My name is Anthony; I'm a member of the Ohio LoCo.

While browsing other LoCo sites, I noticed that there is a large
interest within the midwest to host conferences, with Ohio's Ohio
Ubucon, Indiana's Linux Fest, and Michigan's Penguicon. While sometimes
it's hard to hold several conferences by small times, I just wanted to
shoot around the idea of creating a combined Ubucon / Linux Fest for all
of the Midwest LoCo's.

Thanks for your time!

[Jeff Hanson]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Anthony Hall

Post by Anthony Hall
Hi all! My name is Anthony; I'm a member of the Ohio LoCo.
While browsing other LoCo sites, I noticed that there is a large
interest within the midwest to host conferences, with Ohio's Ohio
Ubucon, Indiana's Linux Fest, and Michigan's Penguicon. While sometimes
it's hard to hold several conferences by small times, I just wanted to
shoot around the idea of creating a combined Ubucon / Linux Fest for all
of the Midwest LoCo's.

I'm generally against distro-specific events. It fragments the
community and we don't have an excess of members to afford that.

One of the reasons for regional conferences is travel overhead. With
work schedule conflicts and high fuel prices it's better to have many
smaller conferences that are closer to where attendees live.

I don't see the point of a large regional install fest unless there is
some location with an unusually high concentration of Windows-haters
that would benefit from it. Most of my install problems aren't going
to be solved by even expert Ubuntu users. I need X.org and kernel
hackers willing to deal with undocumented hardware and broken ACPI
implementations. It would take more than a day or even a week to fix
them and I don't feel like dragging a lot of hardware along on a long
trip.

In short, I'm not willing to travel 400+ miles for a one day
distro-specific event.

What would probably make more sense is to have a week-long seminar of
sorts for training trainers in various aspects of Ubuntu development
like:

testing and bug reporting
key management and package creation
common deployment scenarios (local repositories, LTSP, stand-alone
business servers, Windows and Mac integration)

LUGs could pay for a few people to attend and then come back and lead
bug and packaging jams to teach the rest of the groups.

[Michael Schultheiss]

Post by Anthony Hall
Hi all! My name is Anthony; I'm a member of the Ohio LoCo.
While browsing other LoCo sites, I noticed that there is a large
interest within the midwest to host conferences, with Ohio's Ohio
Ubucon, Indiana's Linux Fest, and Michigan's Penguicon. While sometimes
it's hard to hold several conferences by small times, I just wanted to
shoot around the idea of creating a combined Ubucon / Linux Fest for all
of the Midwest LoCo's.
Thanks for your time!

The CINLUG board came up with a similar idea about combining the various
Midwest Linux conferences into a single annual Midwest event that
rotated among the states. Indiana could host one year, Ohio the next,
Michigan the third, etc. I think it's a great idea and by pooling
resources and attendee pools we can potentially create better events
than we could individually.