SPUG: not quite random thoughts on the current crop of user groups

Fred Morris m3047 at inwa.net
Fri Aug 22 11:33:11 CDT 2003


I've been in the IT racket for 20 years. Early on in my career I joined the
Seattle chapter of DECUS (SeaLUG). After that went away I looked
sporadically at UGs but for some reason they never really clicked for me.
For the past year I've been attending both GSLUG and SPUG fairly regularly.

I'm coming to some conclusions about the current crop of user groups.
Among those conclusions: I don't see enough people having fun; their
workings are not transparent; and they suffer from the ills which typically
accrue with charismatic leadership.


SeaLUG never charged me money.. or wanted any. By the time it finally faded
away (some time after DEC was subsumed by Compaq), it still had money in
the bank (literally). The national DECUS convention cost money (and the
only time I went was when my employer paid my way), and when we had
regionals we charged for those: renting facilities and equipment, getting
insurance, etc. costs money. Aside from charging for seminars and whatnot,
how did SeaLUG get money? I think the national DECUS gave us a little
initially. How did we manage to have money? We spent it carefully, we
always thought free was good, and we had a national organization which
perhaps didn't underwrite costs but which served as a non-interfering
umbrella organization and was able to pool some risks; but in the end I
suppose it was an accident... which would of course never have happened
without our creating the correct opportunity. (By the way, DECUS had a
fairly extensive library of free software.)

A lot of people in SeaLUG were pretty darned boring. But that's a personal
taste as much as anything. However, there are other reasons for networking
besides getting a job; one of those is to get to know other people. Not
everybody was boring. I've still got a couple of friends from that era. It
seems like with GSLUG and SPUG you don't really get to know many people...
unless they're spreading some glamour, and it's hard to say how accurate or
useful that really is in the longer term sense of building relationships.


SeaLUG's primary mission in life in my opinion was a place to get together
and discuss DEC (it was not "owned" by Digital); SeaLUG did a pretty good
job of that, as did DECUS as a whole. SeaLUG also took on occasional
projects, notably the regionals and the wiring of Coe School. That's not a
lot in a span of over a decade and maybe there are others which escape me.
Nonetheless, why weren't there more? I think the reasons for that will seem
familiar: interest of the membership and organization. Yet when there was
enough interest things got done, there was no question of a single point of
failure or single-vote veto.


The workings of SeaLUG were quite transparent. There were rules, there were
elected officers, and of course there was a clear purpose. In the case of
GSLUG and SPUG the first two simply do not apply. "Clear purpose" is an
interesting one, but I somehow think that if you'd polled the membership
you would have gotten some agreement; I don't know if you polled the
membership of GSLUG or SPUG whether you'd get that sort of agreement.


People announced job openings at SeaLUG, yes. I don't see this same
situation with GSLUG, but I have some questions about the job openings
announced at SPUG:

jobs.perl.org had an announcement for CarDomain on August 4th. That one
never made it to the list. We seem to hear frequently (for some value of
"frequently") about Amazon. We hear about them frequently enough that I
have some questions: What are they paying? Are these new positions or is
their turnover that high? What are their engineering practices like? How
does any of this relate to their less than stellar employment practices as
reported elsewhere, if at all?

I am glad to see Cray's positions announced here (finally). I tried to
bring them up in July and was ignored. Oh well.

It does seem that all jobs have to go through Tim. What are the real
reasons for that? I'm sure there are some, and "protecting" the membership
is not one of them. I humbly suggest that if I have these sorts of nagging
thoughts, perhaps people who might otherwise be inclined to announce
opportunities have them as well.


How are presentations chosen? None of the three organizations had written
guidelines. I know it takes some work to find people who are willing to
make presentations. SeaLUG was a democratic institution; GSLUG has started
polling the membership; what about SPUG?

A fair number of SeaLUG presentations were fairly boring. With both GSLUG
and (especially) SPUG the entertainment factor seems much higher. Is that
good or bad? Is it symptomatic of something?


In both GSLUG and SPUG I see occasional displays where eccentricity crosses
a line that I refer to as the Second Shwartzian Transform... you know that
one whose final formulation as a Lagrange Polynomial is sometimes referred
to as "felony stupidity". Where does critical thinking go in these cases?

A recent example from GSLUG, and I suppose I should have found it
entertaining (silly me), was the "security consultant" giving a
presentation about using SSH to bust firewalls. That's fine that's good,
but saying "this could get you fired" just ain't the same as giving the
nitty gritty details of traffic analysis and other means to identify this
sort of behavior. Telling people how proxy servers are great to tunnel
through ain't the same as telling them maybe they want to be really careful
about running one lest spammers and "security consultants" find out about
it (somebody from the audience shouldn't have to bring this up). There's
definitely some serious attention-getting behavior at work here. Maybe Perl
security will be even funnier.

I think Tim's fetish with Perl certification is going down the same road.
Obviously if I hear the name Shwartz anywhere near "certification" I'm
going to spit; but besides that... The University of Washington's program
costs a lot of money. The cost should be made very clear to people 1) so
that they know how much and 2) so that they know it's an advertisement!
While we're at it, who's it open to, and how does a 40+ year old with
nearly 20 years experience and no degree get it for free or $100? Maybe
somebody from the UW could come and give a talk about this; I'd definitely
show up! I think you can see where this is going: most of the blather about
certification seems to me like "marketecture". Where does the money go? How
do we get certified for free? Most of the certs that people want (or don't
want, there are camps on both sides of the aisle) are underwritten (that's
an understatement) by companies which make a lot of money selling the
infrastructure the certs are targeted for; they also spend a lot of money
marketing said infrastructure.

W(h)ither town crier? I'm sure there are other examples. For me there's no
escaping the fact that SPUG's agenda is Tim's agenda; maybe if it was
clearer what that was, I could make up my mind about it.


The fundamental problem with charismatic leadership as an organizational
model is that whether or not the leader promotes it as a cult of
personality, it encourages imitation within the membership (and if the
leadership doesn't actively encourage this, it is usually blind to it).
That imitation is counter to the dynamics needed by professional
organizations of peers; it's also counter to easy and open fraternity,
which is needed for fun, fellowship and playing around. It also leads to a
situation where the people who get involved are often seeking attention...
and when they don't get it they lose interest.




I'd like to see more critical thought about these things in the broader
organizational context, but maybe that's just me. I also don't see people
having enough of what I would consider "fun"; somehow the tag in somebody's
.sig that animals learn by playing therefore comes across to me as a
desperate plea for help. Maybe this will help.

Maybe the fundamental flaw with this critique is that neither SPUG nor
GSLUG is intended to be a professional organization of peers (I suspect the
folks at GSLUG would say "you are correct!", but I'm fairly certain they do
want to have fun, fellowship and play.).


Where are you supposed to discuss things like this in a charismatic
organization? I guess you aren't; but, fait accompli. I therefore close
with Grace Hopper's quip that 'tis better to beg forgiveness than to ask
permission and a reminder that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

I just can't seem to raise my level of interest in either GSLUG or SPUG
much beyond entertainment value; I've basically given up on anything else
with SPUG, although I still have some inclinations with regard to GSLUG. If
anybody has a suggestion as to an organization of professional peers with a
local presence which is low or no cost and is run without charisma as the
glue let me know. I'd say "Or hey, let's make one", but I'm not sure what
the organizational mission would be: figuring out how we can make money?
Well, that's a thought. But I think it's going to attract the wrong kind of
crowd, because there are just too many scared cowboys out there right now.
Maybe I'll start checking out Seattle Wireless...

--

Fred Morris
m3047 at inwa.net





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