2008/7/18 MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop>:

samwise <samwise@bagshot-row.org> wrote:

...

Wayne, you haven't missed any further posts. I thought it best not to overload this list with discussion on venues which only affect a sub-set of ALUG people.

It's very rare that anything on the list affects every ALUG person and this list isn't exactly busy right now, so please keep it on-list to avoid excluding new members.

I agree with you in principle, MJ, but in this case I think it makes more sense for those ppl who are actually attending the meets face-to-face to discuss potential new venues, than to throw it wide open to everyone else who unfortunately aren't able to make the Ipswich meets. It's not that big a deal anyway - we'll be staying in the town centre with parking, so anyone wanting to attend won't have any more trouble finding us than when we were in The Milestone, wherever we end up. Speaking of which. New venue trial starts tonight with The Punch & Judy. Hope to see some of you there! Peter.

Part of that problem is that people who currently don't go to a meeting due to parking/access/whatever reasons who are in Ipswich won't get a hand in saying anything.

Please direct me to someone who had any problem attending the Ipswich meets for any of those reasons. I'd genuinely be happy to discuss how our venue choice could be improved to increase potential attendees. We worked very hard last time to select a venue which was the most accessible, and fully documented it (and all the parking etc.) on the wiki. We will go through the same rigorous selection process again this time - in fact, The Punch & Judy is the one venue that could be seen as more accessible than our last, because it's even closer to the train station. It's possible we could make access easier for individuals by radically moving away from the town centre and towards where they live, but I don't think that would be of benefit for the majority. Currently we intend to factor in ample parking, walking distance from the bus/train stations, quiet enough that we can hear ourselves, big enough tables to accommodate at least 10 of us and, with a slightly lesser priority: free wi-fi access, reasonably-priced meals for anyone who wants to eat early and a selection of decent local ales*. If anyone has any suggestions to add to that last, we can add those for consideration. Peter. * Yes, some might argue this should be the highest priority. Let's not start that ...

All I'm doing is passing on experience that has been made from the ways we have chosen venues for alug meetings in the past, if you want to do it a different way then fine. I'm not pointing to a specific nature of anything, just a general one and increasing openess usually helps, especially with the nature of something related to open and free software ;)

Excluding people in an arbitary manner tends to split communities more than including them.

Fair enough. Let's consider this thread an opening, for anyone who would like to share their views/thoughts/recommendations on where they'd like the Ipswich venue to be. That would be genuinely useful to hear other peoples views. However, the final decision has to rest with those ppl who are the ones going to attend the meets - if you want to draw analogies with the open source movement, it doesn't matter how many ppl outside the Linux kernel development community may want to move the license for it to GPL v3, it isn't going to happen unless a significant number of the developers agrees ... ;) Peter.

I'm a big believer in "who does, wins" but nothing in that requires the discussion or decision to be in private. Indeed, many eyeballs make bugs shallow... but I think we're in vigorous agreement now.

I think we are too. Now, does anyone actually have anything to say on the subject? ;) Peter.