[NTLUG:Discuss] NTLUG veterans helping Linux newbies?

[Kendall Clark]

>>>>> "Kelly" == Kelly Scroggins <kelly at cliffhanger.com> writes:

    Kelly> I'm with ya Bobby!  I've got a lab in a spare bedroom of my
    Kelly> house with room for a couple of other puters if people
    Kelly> wanted to bring'em and network'em.

    Kelly> I think Kendall is very much in tune with the needs of the
    Kelly> newbie portion of our community, and I appreciate this
    Kelly> thread (attempt) to find some sort of resolution.

Hehe, if that's true, it's merely by sheer dumb luck! I'm sure I'm
*not* attuned to much of anything, but I do know that we've always
fiddled with the mixture of NTLUG activities for newbies and those for
veterans. That's, imo, the main job of leaders of NTLUG: to keep our
eyes and ears as open as possible to signs that we are or aren't
getting the mixture right (where 'getting it right' means, roughly,
serving the fat part of the curve of NTLUG's constituency at any
particular point in its development). It's only been in the past 15
months or so that Linux has so exploded as to alter radically the
demographics of NTLUG to be rather newbie heavy.

Hey, this is a *good* thing as Chris Cox rightfully pointed out
recently; it means Linux and NTLUG are doing something right. But
being a good thing, alas, doesn't make it an *easy* thing.

    Kelly> I hope to obtain enough proficiency with Linux someday to
    Kelly> volunteer as one ot the mentors.  I love to share things
    Kelly> that I'm passionate about, like Linux.

I think one thing that we should all take away from this thread is
that you don't have to be an expert at *everything* (that's not really
possible anyway) or even at *lots* of things. Expertise in just one
significant area of Linux/Unix systems administration is valuable,
when shared, with everyone else in the group who doesn't have
expertise in that area. Hell, it doesn't even have to be expertise;
for example, I recently went through setting up INND from scratch on
one of my Web servers and, while I'm nowhere near a Usenet guru now, I
can pass along some of my experience, which, in this case, as in
nearly every other, falls well short of expertise.

The trick is making NTLUG an environment where one primary can happen
more often than not: people with expertise and experience get to
communicate it to people who need that expertise

Everything else, imnsho, is just gravy.

Kendall
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