[TriLUG] TriLUG non-profit status?

[Maryam Abkar via TriLUG]

sorry for taking a bit to get back to you. I ask out of curiosity and
perhaps some more wishful thinking than I realized. A lot of discussion in
the current steering committee discussions center quite a bit around how to
restore and rebuild TriLUG, which has sparked some interest in reviving old
structures and systems-- but as several of the other members have pointed
out (and they make a great point), TriLUG has changed forms so some things
in the past might not fit what TriLUG does now.   sometimes that's just how
it goes.

-Maryam A.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 4:20 PM Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>