[BALUG-Admin] new BALUG venue >=2014-10 - LOCATION TO BE DETERMINED

[Scott DuBois]

On 07/17/2014 04:01 AM, Michael Paoli wrote:
> 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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WOW! That sucks! I thought after all these years Four Seas would have
owned that place, guess not. I don't frequent SF enough to know anyone
but I'll ask around.

-- 
Scott DuBois
President EBLUG
BSIT Software Engineering
Freenode: Roguehorse