Andy, and All,

Certainly an enjoyable time in Hebden Bridge after a gap of nearly 4 years.

Well Done Andrew and his team for creating such a memorable event. The attendance exceeded all expectations, proving that such an event was way overdue, and we all descended on HB to get our annual fix!

I would like to see some specialist events hosted at TNMoC or some of the other excellent Computing History museums, for example Cambridge or Manchester.

Liverpool, West Midlands and other regional cities are doing very interesting things in the OSH field.

Perhaps the idea of regional centres of excellence, might be one way to spread the coverage, and have greater accessibility for those that do not necessarily have the means to travel to London once a month.

These venues are generally reachable by train or car, for perhaps a long day visit, and a specialist tour and possibly demonstrations of the exhibits.

This would be very informative to learn how vintage construction techniques and use of wartime GPO and RADAR equipment led to the beginnings of the British Computer Industry.

For those that cannot attend in person, properly recorded Zoom presentations would at least give a flavour of the meet-ups.

Just my tuppence worth!

Ken

On Wed, 6 Sept 2023 at 09:12, Andy Bennett via oshug <oshug@oshug.org> wrote:

Hi all,

It was great to see so many of you a week or so ago at Wuthering Bytes
and OSHCamp in Hebden Bridge. It was a sell-out and there were
definitely more chairs in the hall compared to 2019. All the thanks and
credit must go to Andrew Back who organised another wonderful weekend
with a great lineup of speakers and workshoppes.

Several of you approached me over that weekend or have been in touch
since to say that you really enjoyed the sense of community and to ask
about the old meetups in London. It was clear that many people were out
of contact with OSHUG and that communications have been sparse. This is
my fault so I apologise.

Some of you will know that we used to co-organize meetups once a month
in London with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. The turnout was
generally good and when lockdown happened in early March 2020 the
meetings went online. For the first year things were well attended,
seeing audience numbers more than double from the in-person meetups with
attendees all over the country and speakers from Europe and occasionally
the US or other places in the world. However, very few of these were
advertised to the OSHUG membership base because announcements only went
out when there was a very strong hardware focus. Moreover, although the
attendance was incredibly high, the sense of community, especially the
serendipitous interaction and networking, was completely absent.

Over the recent weekend, and since, people have spoken and it seems that
there might be a renewed opportunity to do something about this. If you
were one of those people, or have the same sentiments, I'd like to
invite you to reply to this message on the mailing list so that we can
get the discussion out into the open.

I'm in London so can help organise something here, including finding a
venue, perhaps again at the BCS or maybe somewhere else. If anyone
anywhere else in the country would like to do something similar then
please also speak up.

It was great to see so many people in Hebden Bridge and hopefully see a
few of you again soon!

Please reply to this message with your thoughts about a renewed set of
meetups as well as where in the country you'd like to see them.

--
andyjpb@ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
http://www.gonumber.com/andyjpb
0x7EBA75FF
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