[kwlug-disc] Summary of restaurant discussion

[Paul Nijjar]

My tl;dr is that I am largely in agreement with what you say, but I
have some nuances to offer.

On Fri, Oct 10, 2025 at 08:10:31PM -0400, Spencer Hughes via
kwlug-disc wrote:
> 
> Next, I would like to be clear that I am advocating for these
> courses of action *if* we have certain desires based on a set of
> assumptions on my part. My understanding of the question that was
> asked that sparked this discussion had to do with promoting the
> group on social media. This question involves, in my mind, the
> assumption of a desire to bring new members into our group and/or to
> promote continued member involvement. As such, this assumption goes
> somewhat unquestioned in the following commentary; I assume that a
> thing we want to do is to develop the group in terms of membership
> and attendance. This assumption may be questioned, but I am not
> doing so at this time.

My nuance here is that it would be nice to have some new members, but
not for the sake of growth. My goal is to keep the LUG healthy. That
includes the following:

- Enough members go to meetings and participate in other LUG
  activities to "feel worthwhile". 

- There is enough energy within the group to keep the group running.
  (This is why Andrew glares at you every month when he asks for
  presentation offers -- members offering "enough" presentations
  without any single presenter dominating is an important marker of
  health.)

- People who would enjoy/benefit from participating in the LUG are
  able to do so. (We definitely fall down here, in the sense that
  there are probably lots of people in Waterloo Region who might enjoy
  being part of the community but are not aware of it, and lots of
  people who have been turned off of KWLUG for one reason or another
  and won't give it another chance.)

If we had another 100 in-person attendees that would be too many. If
our attendance (online + in-person) was tiny (like 5 people) then that
is too few. I personally do not think KWLUG is all that healthy, but
its condition is stable.

> 
> Firstly, these methods of communication lack visibility. In order to
> find them you effectively need to be looking for them, and even if
> you do they are not particularly easy to find. Additionally, we
> don't promote these channels very prominently; while it's entirely
> possible that I've just missed it, I don't remember the email list
> being mentioned during the meetings, at least not more than in
> passing.

The primary way these are advertised is on the front page of kwlug.org
. I agree we could promote these better.


> Even though we have a regular schedule, it is
> useful to remind people of upcoming meetings close to when the occur so that
> they are reminded to plan to attend. I also think that having ongoing
> conversations will help to foster the community.

We have the following forms of meeting announcements so far:
- The kwlug-announce emails before each meeting
- Advertising on LinkedIn, kwtechs.slack.com 
- Posts to Mastodon when we have scheduled a meeting
- Possibly events on Luma 

We could definitely use more. Tim has started a Reddit, but I strongly
agree with the suggestion that we announce meetings on /r/kitchener,
/r/waterloo, /r/cambridgeont . Is there a Redditor that would be
willing to take that on?

We have a Twitter but it is mostly defunct. It could be revived.

We could easily have a BlueSky/Threads/Instagram/TikTok, but other
people would have to manage these. Is anybody interested in setting
these up? I understand the reluctance that some people would have
about KWLUG if they were to see our posts on Instagram, but that is a
risk that might be worth taking.

> I am also not advocating for migrating *off* of the existing
> communication platforms. There is both pedigry and charm in the
> local Linux user group still having a mailing list or an IRC server.
> It is, to some degree, an expected convention of the genre, if you
> will. If anything, this should be read as an argument for
> integrating the existing communication channels into whatever
> emerges from this discussion.

There will be inevitable conversations about providing a unified view
of all discussions across all platforms. My own opinion is that this
is a tarpit of pain. But if people want to try to make this happen
then we can try.

> In the FOSS option we deploy and manage the FOSS alternatives to the
> mainstream social media platforms and promote using them to
> participate in our community.  Instead of Reddit, we run Lemmy.
> Instead of Discord, we have a Matrix. Instead of Twitter, we use
> Mastodon. This option is, in my mind, more respectful of the core
> principles of the group. 

We already have an active Mastodon account. It mostly rebroadcasts RSS
feeds now. I don't really see how having a separate KWLUG mastodon
server helps us that much: interested KWLUG members can sign up for
Mastodon accounts in a lot of other places.

If somebody wants to set us up with Matrix/Lemmy/etc then that is
fine. Again, we can co-operate with whatever DNS entries and email
aliases are needed for this. But also again, somebody else has to take
responsibility for babysitting these.

> We should also be promoting the communication channels before and
> after every meeting. In addition to verbal callouts during the
> introduction, I think we should have a slide that is displayed
> before and after the meeting with links and/or QR codes to the
> places that can be found online. If we're putting the effort into
> running this, we should be telling people about it, and a group of
> people who are particularly inclined to socialize with us online are
> people who have made the effort to attend a meeting.

I think we could mention the communications channels at the beginning
of each meeting. 

When people subscribe to kwlug-announce they get a message about
kwlug-disc. 

One issue here is that if we are expecting people to have discourse on
these alternative platforms, then we really need them to be monitored
and active. At this point kwlug-disc is monitored and active, so it is
our primary channel. But this could happen on other platforms as well.

- Paul