Quoting Amy Klein (aklein@google.com):
Hi Rick:
Thank you for getting back to me!
Question for you...How large in your group? What type of topics are you looking to be presented?
Hi, Amy. The group's attendence tends to vary a lot based on topic and (presumably) conflicting events. Meetings are held at the upstairs banquet room of a Chinatown restaurant (the Four Seas) that can accomodate several hundred people, and the speaker's presentation follows a banquet-style dinner. (The speaker eats courtesy of the audience, of course.) Typical BALUG meeting attendance is about 50 people -- sometimes more, sometimes fewer.
The audience is predominantly technical, so the best sorts of presentations are likewise, e.g., presentations about aspects of Linux and open source at Google, or Chris di Bona doing his talk about the Summer of Code program, or Marc Merlin talking about Exim (both friends of mine <grin>).
Odds are, if a topic would be interesting to Google's own engineers and sysadmins, it would be to BALUG's membership, too.
I am not actually the person who handles speakers for BALUG, but I'll be forwarding our mail to the people who do (CC'd). Thank you for your interest in BALUG!