SILUG Presentation

["James L. Burke" <jburke@burkepoirier.com>]

Hey Folks,

I just wanted to make sure everyone in the group was informed about an
upcoming meeting that I will be participating in.

Many of you may remember that we had some visitors a few months back from a
local recruiting, consulting, hiring, and training firm (Janet Micheel of
RCH).  This firm is sponsoring the July Belleville Chamber of Commerce
Business After Hours.  They wanted to have a presentation on Linux and the
Open Source Movement.

I have agreed to give that presentation and basically I will be giving a
"case study" on what Burke & Poirier Law Firm has done with Linux, Apache,
Sendmail, MySQL, PHP, etc...

The Chamber's July Business After Hours is this Thursday the 12th at 5:00
p.m. at the Clinton Hill Country Club on Old Collinsville Road in Swansea.
I anticipate this presentation being about 15 minutes and them a question
and answer.  I will be giving the presentation at 5:30 and again at 6:30.

I regularly attend these Business After Hours and find that these events are
usually well attended by local business owners.  These small business owners
are just the type of people who struggle with technology and the cost of
licensing software and the cost of software that just doesn't work.

I think this is a good opportunity to promote the virtues of open source to
someone other than people who already understand the concept.  These are
just the type of people who could make open source a "mainstream"
distribution method.  Also, the vast majority of these business owners don't
want to learn how to do this themselves - they are not likely to become
SILUG members ... they just want it to work! and undoubtedly one of the main
questions I will get will be about support.

Therefore, I thought some SILUG members might want to show up and help
answer questions and, especially for those of you who consult for a living,
you could help demonstrate in person that there are professionals who can
support Open Source Software and help small businesses take advantage of
this licensing alternative.

If anyone is interested in helping out with this event it should only take
about an hour and a half of your time.  I would like to have some technical
expertise available for the possible Windows NT advocate/heckler (though
truthfully I could probably handle two MCSE's with one hand tied behind my
back) and it might also be interesting to have some cool demo's.  I will
only have my laptop running Red Hat 6.2 there to give the presentation on
... if someone wanted to bring a box to let people see other things running,
that might be good.  Remember, these are business owners ... they may not
find the latest compiler very interesting, but a demo of the latest release
of Ximian Evolution might get their attention ... anyway ...

Any help anyone can offer would be great and it might be a good way to meet
business owners who need knowledgeable, honest, qualified consultants ...

Please let me know ahead of time if you wish to help.

Thanks,
jburke

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