Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

This is now almost two weeks old, but I think it probably deserves something in the Heads-Up department to keep other people on the Planet Linux blogosphere amused, if nothing else.

Chris Smart (one of the men behind Kororaa), Rod Peters from the Canberra PC Users Group, and myself, gave a presentation at the CLUG meeting on the 22nd of June about an idea which grew out of a Programming SIG meeting on the 8th. Chris had the slogan "Make The Move" in his head as a promotional piece to get people to move from proprietary, closed-source operating systems to open, open-source ones like Linux, and we brainstormed for most of the session about how to get the word out, how to make it easy for people new to Linux to learn about it and get the most out if it. So we gave a presentation about this basic idea, talking about the various ways to get people interested and the ideas we had in mind to go beyond simple installfests to real promotion and after-'market' support and so forth. It's a deliberate, although light-hearted and hopefully enjoyable, attempt to augment the normally unashamedly technical CLUG meetings with a time and place where people new to Linux can still get together and Get Stuff Working.

(Rant about people who criticise me for not doing enough in front of the entire meeting, and then completely and magnificently fail to do anything, deleted. You hear me frothing at the mouth too much anyway.)

As part of this, Chris registered http://www.makethemove.net and put a wiki on it to start gathering ideas and stuff. And I've gradually, in between all the other things I've been doing, been putting text and ideas up on the wiki.

The idea is that makethemove.net is a storehouse of ideas and material to promote Linux in your area, and each LUG would customise it for their own methods and name. "LUV presents Make The Move", "SLUG presents", etc. etc. We're not really trying to duplicate other work such as ASK-OSS, Edubuntu, or many of the other efforts that I haven't time to think of right now. It's more a way for Linux Users Groups to get into the community.

That's the plan, anyway. Enjoy.