[TriLUG] Do Linux User groups still serve a useful purpose?

[Igor Partola]

Perhaps I am a but late to the party but here are the ways I find LUG's
useful to me:

1. A great way to meet professionals in the area. While the Linux user base
is widening, to this day an average LUG goer is highly skilled and has tons
of specialized knowledge I do not.

2. To hear about job opportunities. TriLUG has at least one exciting job a
week.

3. GPG key signing seems to go hand in hand with LUG's.

4. Interesting tech is highlighted at LUG meetings. Sure, I can learn to
configure apache from some very specific tutorial site, but I have to know
what to look for first. For example I had no idea what Metasploit was
before the pen. testing presentation at TriLUG.

5. The mailing list. While Stack Overflow and such are great, I find
answers given on LUG mailing lists to take longer but be more in depth and
people will try to understand your whole problem, not just what you are
asking (often very different things).

6. Sense of belonging. This is important to a lot of people, as us geeks
tend to often feel more at home with other geeks.

7. Hardware swap service. I have given away some hardware through TriLUG
and am confident it went to a good home. This in fact could be done better.
A regular registry of wanted/not wanted hardware would be great. I am
convinced that most of us hold onto certain tech because we are terrified
of it getting destroyed, even if we have no use for it.

8. Not useful to me today, but education is huge. If I had a LUG that did a
Programming workshop when I was growing up, I would have had a much easier
time.

That is about it, in no particular ranking order. I do think that LUG's
serve an important role in 2013 and onward. Perhaps calling them *Linux*
User Groups is the troublesome part, since they seem to have transcended
being just about Linux. To me, they seem more about FOSS, hardware, and
computer networking, but I cannot think of a nice acronym for that.

Igor