Consilience

We did it!

A great big thanks! goes out to all of the wonderful people who responded to the call to show their support and contribute to the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo’s sponsorship of a MUG meeting. We raised more than the amount needed before our deadline of May 1st. Thanks to the contributors the Michigan LoCo team will be donating $185 to MUG to support its efforts bringing high quality Free/Open Source and Linux-focused events in the South East Michigan area.

What next?
Next, the Michigan LoCo team will source a couple presentations from our group to give at a MUG meeting this summer. Let me know if you want to present on a topic! And of course, it is time for a huge influx of Michigan LoCo members at that meeting.

Thanks again to all of the contributors!

Last week I was interviewed (.mp3) for the very awesome, very fun Lococast hosted by the always enjoyable Rick Harding and Craig Maloney. We hit on many of my various interests including: copyright, open data, open educational resources (OERs), Creative Commons, community management, the Michigan LoCo team, and Ubuntu more generally,

It was great fun sitting down with Rick and Craig for about an hour; they always make it enjoyable.

[tl;dr: The Michigan LoCo team is going to sponsor a MUG meeting! Help us raise money by contributing to greg@grossmeier.net on Paypal!]

Background / About MUG
As many of you may know, one of the best linux related groups in Michigan is MUG, or Michigan!/usr/group. They hold monthly meetings in Southfield, Michigan. Many Ubuntu LoCo team members have been attending MUG meetings for a long time and I highly recommend checking them out if you have a chance. In fact at their last meeting, March 8th, our very own Craig Maloney (snapl on IRC) presented on how to create a podcast. As many of you know, Craig and Rick Harding are the co-hosts of the awesome Lococast. And the Ubuntu Michigan LoCo/MUG intermingling doesn’t stop there. Many other LoCo members have presented in the past include Jorge Castro, Rick, and myself.

MUG also brings in amazing out of town speakers and can do that because they help pay the travel costs as much as possible. The room they use for the meetings is also something they have to pay for each time. Thus, to put on such great events with such great content requires some money. This is why they have yearly membership dues of $35. I know that some LoCo members are also paying MUG members.

The Proposal
MUG has also recently started a new program where a business or group can sponsor a meeting.

Basically, what this means is that we could, as a group, raise the $150 to sponsor a MUG meeting where we could then have an Ubuntu-themed meeting and any member of the Michigan LoCo will be considered a full member for 2011.

Really, the best part is contributing to the success of MUG and having an Ubuntu-themed MUG meeting.

The How
Lets raise that required $150 as fast as we can! We’re already about half-way there, but the deadline is May 1st. I will be accepting contributions to my Paypal account (greg@grossmeier.net). When we hit $150 I’ll send a note to our team’s mailing list, my blog, and let the MUG Board know.

Also, in case anyone has any reservations about giving money to me to then give to MUG, I will log into my Paypal account for any LoCo member who attends a MUG meeting and show the contribution information.

The next part is the best: Our sponsored meeting.

Our Meeting
We shooting to have our sponsored meeting in either June or July. Since it’ll be Ubuntu-themed we should have one or two great Ubuntu-related talks. These can be anything from a how-to to a case study of your use of Ubuntu in some really interesting situation (run 1000 Ubuntu servers in a cluster? Tell us about it!).

Let me or the list know if you have a topic that you would like to present!

Questions?

Let me know if you have any questions about this fundraiser or MUG in general.