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).