new BALUG venue >=2014-10 - location to be determined
Four Seas Restaurant lost their lease. We still have meeting space there
through our September meeting (their last regular day of business will
be 2014-09-27). For our October meeting and beyond, we'll need a new
meeting location. Anyway, this can (and likely will) be discussed on
the "talk" list, and I'll also mention it fairly soon on the "announce"
list (not later than whenever we put out our next regular announcement).
Hopefully we'll come up with a good/excellent "permanent" (well, at
least long-term) location, but in any case we'll certainly meet
*somewhere*.
My initial thoughts:
o BALUG has always met in San Francisco, and almost always at the Four
Seas Restaurant in Chinatown. Despite it being the
"Bay Area Linux Users Group", given history and momentum, etc., it's
probably most appropriate/best to come up with a regular meeting
location that's in San Francisco, and not too far time/distance-wise
via walking or short Muni/BART hop from the general
Financial District/Downtown/SOMA/Chinatown area, or some reasonable
approximation thereof (e.g. parts of the Mission). Notably a fair
percentage of our typical attendees come in from the East Bay, and a
significant percentage of those come in via BART. Of course we may
have a bit of the self-selecting sample set phenomenon, but if we want
to retain at least most of our attendee base, we'd probably want
something at least fairly comparably convenient regarding location
(and also some kind of semi-reasonable parking not all that far away).
o Opportunity(?) :-) ... changes? Perhaps best to think of it as an
"opportunity" - perhaps we can improve or significantly improve some
factors of our meeting location. The
"Good locations for a BAD meeting will have" listed on:
http://bad.debian.net/shotgun_rules.txt
gives a pretty good overview of what generally constitutes a good
meeting location, though some of that is different for BALUG. Notably
BALUG sometimes has large crowds - e.g. >=110 people for some of our
meetings. BALUG also almost always meets at the same fixed location.
o (relatively) Unique to BALUG - some things are relatively unique to
BALUG. Many of them are probably well worth preserving - at least
if/as feasible, others might not be so important (and can sometimes
even be a moderate disadvantage). At least a few that come to mind:
o *typically* has speaker/presentation, and meeting location suitable
to that
o can accommodate *large* crowds, e.g. up to >~=200 people
o relatively convenient location for and in San Francisco, and
considered relatively central to the Bay Area (it is the
"Bay Area Linux Users Group", after all)
o Chinese food - rather good food and a quite good price, and the
simplicity of relatively fixed menu, and fixed price - and able to
handle large meetings. Note also the restaurant/food thing can be
both advantage and disadvantage - some folks often don't come on
account of the food cost/expectation and that part of the meeting
structure. Notably some may quite prefer a much lower to free cost
of totally participating and being present at all parts of the
meeting - while that may not be possible/feasible for many (e.g.
restaurant/cafe) venues, many also have a much "lower cost of
entry" (e.g. minimum purchase might be something like a beverage or
cookie or the like).
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