[vox] LUGOD meeting attendance and new-user signups

[Norm Matloff]

I don't know whether LUGOD, being committed to noncommercial software,
wants to become too "entrepreneurial" in terms of bringing in
"customers." :-)

That said, though, I believe there is a great untapped market among UCD
CS majors.  The vast majority of them have no idea how expertise in
Linux can greatly enhance their job prospects after graduation.  Though
our official machines are Linux boxes, there are a couple of key faculty
who extol the "virtues" of Windows to the students, so most students
do their homework under Windows.  

Norm

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 12:40:29PM -0800, Eric Engelhard wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 06:09:23PM -0800, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > 
> > For a long while, I've been curious to graph LUGOD attendance
> > and LUGOD member signups.[*]  I did that this afternoon.
> > 
> > The membership list ( http://www.lugod.org/members/ ) is driven
> > by a little tab-delimited data file, so it was very trivial to
> > figure out how many members signed up on different months.
> > 
> >   http://lugod.org/documents/history/attendance-histogram-200911.pdf
> > 
> > 
> > How I did it:
> >
> [deleted long method that could probably been accomplished in 7 lines
> of R... kidding, Bill]
> 
> Cool graph. It is interesting to see the waxing and waning of new
> memberships. I wonder how complicated the forces were: dotcom boom and
> bust, rise of more user friendly distros, wider acceptance in the user
> market, competition from new MS and Apple products... departure of
> colorful characters (or at least a wider orbit), etc.
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