Fosdem had a great lecture Building an Open Source Community One Friend at a Time [1]. I recommend that everyone who is involved in the FOSS community watches this lecture to get some ideas.
For some time I’ve been periodically inviting a few friends to visit for lunch, chat about Linux, maybe do some coding, and watch some anime between coding. It seems that I have accidentally created a micro users’ group.
LUGs were really big in the mid to late 90s and still quite vibrant in the early 2000’s. But they seem to have decreased in popularity even before Covid19 and since Covid19 a lot of people have stopped attending large meetings to avoid health risks. I think that a large part of the decline of users’ groups has been due to the success of YouTube. Being able to choose from thousands of hours of lectures about computers on YouTube is a disincentive to spending the time and effort needed to attend a meeting with content that’s probably not your first choice of topic. Attending a formal meeting where someone you don’t know has arranged a lecture might not have a topic that’s really interesting to you. Having lunch with a couple of friends and watching a YouTube video that one of your friends assures you is really good is something more people will find interesting.
In recent times homeschooling [2] has become more widely known. The same factors that allow learning about computers at home also make homeschooling easier. The difference between the traditional LUG model of having everyone meet at a fixed time for a lecture and a micro LUG of a small group of people having an informal meeting is similar to the difference between traditional schools and homeschooling.
I encourage everyone to create their own micro LUG. All you have to do is choose a suitable time and place and invite some people who are interested. Have a BBQ in a park if the weather is good, meet at a cafe or restaurant, or invite people to visit you for lunch on a weekend.
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