[plug] What would encourage membership of PLUG?

[Tim White]

My wife and I were talking about PLUG after our failed AGM last week. 
She wanted to know what are the benefits of joining PLUG and why would 
anyone bother?
Well, here is what the website says.

*Benefits of joining:*

    * Being a PLUG member entitles you to borrow CDs and books from the
      PLUG library <http://www.plug.org.au/resources/library>.
    * You get an account on the club's computers (kettle.plug.org.au and
      spark.plug.org.au), including web space for your own web pages and
      an e-mail address @plug.org.au. (See our terms and conditions
      <http://www.plug.org.au/resources/shell-account> for shell access.)
    * Free coffee (or other drink) with a kebab at Plaka Café in
      Northbridge.
    * PLUG members get a 10% discount at Linux IT
      <http://www.linuxit.com.au/>.
    * You also get spiffy card with a penguin on it.


So my question is, what more could we offer as a group, for paid 
members, that would encourage membership? It's not expensive, a year's 
membership costs $10 (full membership) or $5 (concession). So what would 
stop people from being paid members?

On a technical side of things, I know with the new server, when it is 
running, we hope to be running Xen, so we can have a number of Virtual 
Machines available for people to play with. Is this something that would 
be attractive to members? On the webserver currently, for less than a $1 
a month, you get more hosting space than most cheap hosts give you for 
$10 a month. (Having said that, it's not an invitation to start hosting 
large websites with lots of traffic, as all our traffic is kindly 
donated to us and we wouldn't want to cost our host large amounts in 
traffic, but I think WAIX traffic is generally acceptable if larger 
quantities than non-WAIX).

Anyway, I just thought I'd put this out to the sleeping list, and 
encourage some discussion about it.

What would you want PLUG to offer paid members, that would encourage 
your membership?

Thanks

Tim
p.s. I would love it if someone could check about the discounts we 
advertise that you can get, with Plaka and Linux IT, to see if we can 
still get them. Also, any other business owners/managers that want to 
add a discount, please do!