Re: gEDA-user: The next freedog meeting

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

Wow!  I read four people in Atlanta who want to have a Free Dog group
down there!  That's excellent! 

As for venue, we started out in a classroom at MIT.  HOwever, that
proved too anasceptic, so we moved to a cafe.  YOu should give your
location a little thought.  Find a place where you can spread out a
number of laptops and hang around for hours undisturbed.  It's best if
you can plug in your laptop & not rely upon batteries.  Make sure the
venue will tolerate this.  We currently meet in a Starbucks which is
fairly empty in the evening.

If you want, I can provide a page or more on the Free Dog website for
you to put meeting announcement and other materials.  (Of course, the
website is currently kinda moribund, but with some prodding I will get
around to updating it.) 

I am also happy to make suggestions for meeting topics.  For example,
having one person learn to drive a new EDA or CAD program & demo it
for the others is a good way to learn about what's out there.  That's
what we're trying up here in Boston.  Another idea is to have folks
bring in projects completed with gEDA or other open-source tools &
walk the others through the design files & process.

At one meeting I gave a talk about SPICE & spice-sdb; I would be happy
to give the talk slides & project files to anybody who wanted to
present them (or modifiy and present them). 

I'm also thinking about coding jam sessions, but to do that you need
to have enough developers present to make it work.

Finally, it would be nice to have some of the main developers give
presentations about their work.  However, this requires them to either
live in Atlanta, or to visit (perhaps while in town on different
business).  I'd be happy to present on spice-sdb -- or anything else
-- but rarely travel beyond New York these days.

Stuart


> 
> Dan McMahill wrote:
> 
> > Marvin Dickens wrote:
> >
> >> Being in Atlanta, it's hard for me to attend freedog meetings in 
> >> person. Even so, I'm there in spirit :)
> >
> >
> > we could always start our own southeast region chapter!
> >
> > -Dan
> > (near Atlanta)
> >
> I am in Macon, would love to see it happen.
>