[plug] Society of Linux Professionals (WA) Inaugural Meeting

[Colin Muller]

> >From my experience, it is usual for an inaugural meeting to be held, then,
> suggestions for a charter, or set of rules, and so on, to be discussed, so
> that the organisation is not created before it has members.

That has already all taken place, over the last six weeks or so.
Everyone who reads the PLUG mailing list was invited to participate in
the process, in posts on this list. The discussions did not take place
on this list, because people do not generally use this list in ways
which promote their professional activities, and promoting
professional activities is partly what the new list is about. So we
had a meeting and set up another discussion list, which you were all
invited to join.

Allowing for relatively stiff entry conditions was deliberate, and is
because the Society is intended to represent people who are serious
about being professional about Linux. The reasoning was: allowing for
high standards to be set adds value to full membership, and opens up
the potential for such membership to carry with it a certification
which would have genuine market value. The details of how this will
work and how one will qualify will only solidify as the Society gets
going.

However, the conditions are not intended to exclude people who are
still on the way to that fully professional  point. What has been
proposed on the nascent society's discussion list is that there should
be a variety of levels of membership, including student membership
(which would be significantly cheaper than full membership). The rules
as drafted do not in any way exclude this possibility, and discussions
so far suggest that most people want encouragement of people who are
not yet at the stage of using Linux professionally to be a part of
what the Society is about.

What it is _not_ intended to be is another PLUG, and it is also not
intended to be competition for PLUG. It's operating in a different
space. Otherwise we wouldn't have bothered: PLUG already does an
excellent job of being what it is.

Colin