[TriLUG] TriLUG non-profit status?

[Pete Soper via TriLUG]

TriLUG predates 1999. I read more than once it started in 1993 (one of the first LUGs) and it was not long after that when Steve Goldman (RIP) and I started attending. We started with Linux in 1993 with a "35ish floppy Slackware" release.
Pete

Sep 16, 2026 4:21:21 PM Alan Porter via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>:

> 
> All of our documentation is in the "TriLUG Steering Committee Google Drive", which is where I archived a bunch of stuff last summer:
> 
> * the old steering wiki called "the Book of Secrets"
> * the steering committee's git repo (which was just too hard for some people to access - hence the Google Drive)
> * the old publicly available (and thus trashed) TriWiki
> * a starting point doc called "How to Run the LUG"
> 
> 
> I see that some of these files have been updated recently, so it looks like the current steering committee has access to all of this stuff.
> 
> 
> In short, we started off as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation back in 1999.  That was so we could accept donations of money and equipment from companies who wanted to write them off on their taxes.  The thought was that we would use that gear to bootstrap smaller LUGs in the area.
> 
> Over time, we morphed into a "pizza and talks" club, and we did an exceedingly good job of that.
> 
> But we developed weaknesses around steering committee turnover and knowledge transfer.  So we suffered from administrative rot.  By 2014, our non-profit status with the IRS had been canceled, and no one was really clear what we needed to do to maintain our status with the state.
> 
> ALL OF THIS IS OK -- The LUG's goals changed, the leadership turned over, the new simpler organization worked better.  See Joe Mack's description of how an informal club is run.  That is, no one has to file taxes for the LUG, and the pizza money is stored in a lunch box.
> 
> I am curious what prompted Maryam's question.  I would caution the current and future steering committees to take an honest look at how much (or little) administrative energy they have before committing to any new annual paperwork.  It seems easy.  But remember, sysadmin is easy for geeks like us, and yet our main web/mail server has not been upgraded in 14 years (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS).
> 
> 
> Alan Porter
> TriLUG member since 2003
> steering committee member 2008-2013
> 
> 
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