BayLisa the real problem.

Thu Jun 17 15:39:35 PDT 2004

> Being in the south bay means laziness by nature. Lack of public
> transportation, excess of strip malls and suburbs. That's the lifestyle,
> "do we do something interesting with our life, or do we watch television
> and order out?"

I know where _I_ usually end up on this scale. :-)

> What can we automate in the BayLISA group?  Can we rotate the locations
> of the meetings, to get greater coverage?  Would split-meetings work
> (having video conferencing between two or three sites).

One of the hardest things I did as a board member for BayLISA was to 
arrange a meeting site -- just one at a time.  Some of them didn't come 
with Internet access at all, for less than an extortionate fee (that's when 
the MBONE stuff stopped, for us).  Getting people to show up reliably with 
e.g. drinks and snacks is a major chore.  Getting the video camera set up 
-- remembering to push the button! -- has been a challenge.  All with 
volunteer labor and next to zero cash.  Tripling these things doesn't sound 
like a winner, on the face of it.  But I don't know.  A webcast of some 
kind would be neat (and it's not just me being selfish from out of town; we 
have heard continual requests for this.)

That said, maybe it's time to look again for space.  Apple has been very 
generous, but we like to move somewhat before we wear out our welcome, not 
afterward.  (We were at Incyte too long, and went through two sponsors. 
That was me, being lazy about finding Apple.)

And I think moving it a bit further north is a dandy idea.  You'll never 
get the no-car crowd from the city anyway, so concentrate on the peninsula 
and mid-east-bay, as well as the south bay.  I'd say.  But you take what 
you can get.

Moving also sheds a certain percentage of the attendees (the ones who just 
show up and never look at the web site), so it's best to announce this 
during a peak-attendance meeting, and with a couple of months' notice. 
November (the board election) would be a good month to announce a future 
site change.

So: Who has a line on such a space?