The following members are nominated for election to the LOSURS Board of Directors at the AGM on Sunday, November 25th, 2007:
Andrew Kerr
My name is Andrew Kerr. I'm 32 years old, married, and recently had my first child. Currently, I'm employed at SaskTel as a Technical Analyst.
I've been a member of LOSURS since 1999. While I have not regularly attended meetings, I was involved in planning the first Expo, as well as manning a booth. For the second Expo, I was not able to dedicate as much time and was only available to help with setup. I have been using various OSS since around 1996 when I was first introduced to Slackware Linux. Since then I've been hooked. I have promoted and tried to use OSS in most every job I've held since then.
There are two areas, as I see it, where we are trying to promote OSS. Home users and the business community. With events like the Expo, we've split our time between the two and provided a lot of good information to the public.
At home, I think it would be safe to say, that most PCs are running one version of Windows or another. Trying to get people to switch over to Linux is a very scary step for people without a deep understanding of computers and software. Instead, we should begin by introducing them to products that could replace their existing proprietary ones with open source products, like OpenOffice, ClamAV, Thunderbird, Firefox, GIMP, and countless others. People don't realize that a program like OpenOffice can do most or all of the things that Microsoft Office can, and its free to use. We of course love to talk about how Linux won't crash as often, doesn't need to reboot like Windows does, and can be just as easy to use. I think we can get more people interested if we show them Microsoft Office costing $300 off the shelf, and OpenOffice is free to download. And they'll still be able to open that PowerPoint presentation of that hotel in the UAE.
The business community is a much tougher nut to crack. I'm sure most of us have used, with or without the knowledge of upper management, OSS software at work. I know I have. Some companies welcome it with open arms, while other are skeptical, usually with very little evidence to support their caution. Often times just the mention of Open Source, or Linux will cause walls to go up. I've found that not stressing these points, but instead stressing the benefits of a proven piece of software, regardless of its licensing, is a better path. There is a misconception in business that OSS means no support. This is one of the biggest scares I've seen from business. They know that if it comes down to it, they can always call Microsoft, or IBM, or SUN, and have support, even if its costing hundreds of dollars an hour. They don't realize that commercial support exists for a lot of the software they refuse to consider. MySQL, Apache, Red Hat, etc. all have commercial support packages available.
As a group, we have an amazing amount of knowledge and experience. If we can learn to share that information with each other and the public in general, I think we'll find that as a whole, our community is better for it.
Mark Humphreys
Mark has been a member of LOSURS since its inception, in 1998. In fact, he was responsible for the name LOSURS in the first place!
Summer Hartzfeld
Summer has been a member of LOSURS since 1999.
Scott Wunsch
"Hi, I'm Scott, and I originally founded this group, oh, about nine years ago." If you've come to very many of our monthly meetings over the years, you're probably quite familiar with that line during our regular introductions. I did indeed found LOSURS, along with several other die-hard users way back then, and over the years it has grown into something much greater than I could ever have expected. I'm glad to have been involved in making that happen, and hope that I can continue to play a role in shaping the future of LOSURS.
At the moment, I see a couple areas where the group needs some attention. As the years have gone by, LOSURS has grown to a size that can be somewhat intimidating to new members, and at the same time, we have begun to attract less technical computer users into the Linux fold. I believe LOSURS needs to make some changes to accomodate these users, and make sure that they get what they need from a users' group.
Another issue related to LOSURS' growth is the maintenance of its finances and records. Over the past year, Stacey and I put in a lot of work to get our financial records properly cleaned up, and I believe next year's task should be to set in place policies to ensure that these records stay in good shape in the future. Finally, as I've said before, I'd really like LOSURS to hold a couple of smaller advocacy events, more on the order of the Demo Day that we held way back in the mists of time (a.k.a. 1999). I believe they are an excellent opportunity to show off Linux and Open Source in an approachable manner.