Hey all, I thought I'd like to continue the topic about what we could do to increase attendance meeting. I think working with the community at WPI would be a great thing for us, so long as we try to understand more about the student culture. I've learned that one of the most important things about WPI is that a sense of community and working toward a greater goal are included as part of the curriculum. One of the earliest classes a WPI student takes involves thinking about the biggest problems impacting the world and makes strides to tackling such problems head-on. https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/wpi-plan/10-things-to-know I believe WPI also has a strong background in bioinformatics, and that's a field that can surely benefit from FOSS as we want to encourage openness and ethics when being on the forefront of scientific research that could have sweeping societal impact. The last thing we need is more companies like 23andMe hoarding genetic data for profit. Perhaps WLUG can do more to be involved in such things, emphasizing the importance of "ethical" computing with the problems of DRM, spying/tracking, proprietary software and data formats, software patents, and licenses that lock away data that the community could benefit from. Essentially we could give people more of an opportunity to think about the social aspects and ramifications of technology, and can use that as a framework for creating a better future. These are still ideas I'm throwing at the wall, hopefully something sticks! -Josh
Ideas are great, but I don't think we have a lack of ideas. We need people to step up and implement ideas. What concrete steps do you propose? Who do you propose should do those steps? On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 10:43:30AM -0500, Joshua Stone via WLUG wrote:
Hey all,
I thought I'd like to continue the topic about what we could do to increase attendance meeting.
I think working with the community at WPI would be a great thing for us, so long as we try to understand more about the student culture. I've learned that one of the most important things about WPI is that a sense of community and working toward a greater goal are included as part of the curriculum. One of the earliest classes a WPI student takes involves thinking about the biggest problems impacting the world and makes strides to tackling such problems head-on.
https://www.wpi.edu/project-based-learning/wpi-plan/10-things-to-know
I believe WPI also has a strong background in bioinformatics, and that's a field that can surely benefit from FOSS as we want to encourage openness and ethics when being on the forefront of scientific research that could have sweeping societal impact. The last thing we need is more companies like 23andMe hoarding genetic data for profit.
Perhaps WLUG can do more to be involved in such things, emphasizing the importance of "ethical" computing with the problems of DRM, spying/tracking, proprietary software and data formats, software patents, and licenses that lock away data that the community could benefit from. Essentially we could give people more of an opportunity to think about the social aspects and ramifications of technology, and can use that as a framework for creating a better future.
These are still ideas I'm throwing at the wall, hopefully something sticks!
-Josh
The NatickFOSS group uses gettogether.community instead of meetup.com. I don't know that it has gotten us any visibility but the software is open source. I've been tempted to join meetup to go to Boston Indie Game Developer meetings but have so far held off. The NatickFOSS group also gets a booth at the Science on State Street event at Framingham State. It is a free STEM activity fair for kids. My job at the event is to generally occupy the time of the kids so the other members talk to the parents. First year I had a playstation controller hooked up to my laptop and held it out to any kid that walked by. Last year I brought the arcade machine assembled by my son's cub scout den. Any idea if WPI does any thing similar? Even if it is something only for WPI students it might be useful to alert people to the group's existence. -- Dennis Payne dulsi@identicalsoftware.com https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/dulsi
What do we know about WLUG's history? If it really is one of the oldest LUGs, it might merit a Wikipedia article. It would be great if we could flesh that out, too. This article seems like it could use a list of LUGs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_user_group On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 1:43 PM Dennis Payne via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
The NatickFOSS group uses gettogether.community instead of meetup.com. I don't know that it has gotten us any visibility but the software is open source. I've been tempted to join meetup to go to Boston Indie Game Developer meetings but have so far held off.
The NatickFOSS group also gets a booth at the Science on State Street event at Framingham State. It is a free STEM activity fair for kids. My job at the event is to generally occupy the time of the kids so the other members talk to the parents. First year I had a playstation controller hooked up to my laptop and held it out to any kid that walked by. Last year I brought the arcade machine assembled by my son's cub scout den. Any idea if WPI does any thing similar? Even if it is something only for WPI students it might be useful to alert people to the group's existence.
--
Dennis Payne dulsi@identicalsoftware.com https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/dulsi _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org
participants (4)
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Anderson, Charles R -
Dennis Payne -
Joshua Stone -
Richard Klein