(New) GNU User Group

[Greg Rundlett]

Hi everyone,

I wish I could put more time into this announcement, to explain the hows 
whats whys etc.  The short of it is that I've started a new community 
for GNU software users and developers with a specific focus on the 
Newburyport, MA area.  (Of course it *is* a virtual community, so you 
can participate from anywhere.)  Eventually, as the community grows, I 
would like to have local User Group meetings in Newburyport too.  (The 
public library is a fantastic facility.)

The main focus of my effort is to create a 'living' (always updated), 
searchable, cross-linked, organized knowledge base (using a wiki) of the 
people, and the companies using Free Software in this area.  Of course 
that also means writing about the software and the solutions that people 
use.  I would like to see both the 'simple' things like 'using a 
scanner', 'setting up a network printer', to the more complex like 
'software development on a Linux workstation', 'creating an Extranet 
with Free Software' to 'Point of Sale systems and Accounting'.  There is 
a wealth of knowledge in the archives of this list; my intent with the 
website is to provide a better way to capture the information for 
sharing, re-use and reference.  I don't know about you, but I get tired 
of tracking down the knowledge that I wrote down somewhere, read once a 
while back on the list, or Googling for answers.

I really think the people who make up the Free Software community are 
its biggest assets, but they go unrecognized and are under-appreciated.  
To reinforce the 'people' aspect, I want to install a customized photo 
Gallery, but that effort has not yet begun.

I *have* launched a website:  http://www.nbptgnus.org.  The website is 
based on the wiki software that runs wikipedia.org, so it should be 
robust.  I hope that you will join me there.

Thanks,

Greg Rundlett
p.s.  If DNS changes have not fully propagated, the site is also 
accessible at http://freephile.com/nbpt-gnus/