A couple of years ago I had made a suggestion that a bof be put together at Smalltalk Solutions on Smalltalk user groups, why they are important and what can be done to help spawn more of them. One of my recommendations was that user groups share presentations. The more presentations that are around , the more reason to meet, and the more Smalltalkers meet the better. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the conference that year. I know that the bof was held but so far have not seen any activity on that front.

Anyhow, recently I was given the opportunity to “put up or shut up”. A new stug out in the L.A. area recently put a post out on c.l.s announcing its birth. I emailed them with some suggestions and hopefully words of encouragement. Daniel, their leader, mentioned that some presentation material would be nice which reminded me of the idea that I had not acted upon.

So here:

The NYC Smalltalk User’s Group will make its presentations available to other Smalltalk User groups. We encourage other stugs to take advantage of this and we hope that other stugs will reciprocate and follow suit. We hope that this will motivate current stugs to meet more often but more importantly encourage Smalltalkers to start stugs in their local areas.

So currently, I am in the process of digging up some of our old content, dusting it off and hopefully sending Daniel something soon. I plan to put a link on our wiki sometime in the near future.

Now, what do I mean by open source Smalltalk presentations?

The presentations will be under something akin to GPL i.e. more specifically:

• Presentations are to be used to promote Smalltalk in the context of a Smalltalk user’s group meeting.
• The original authors needs to be credited on the introduction of the presentation.
• Any amendments /extensions need to be documented i.e. the amendment’s author’s name and date.
• The modified presentation must be made available to the original author and any other Smalltalk user’s group which expresses interest.
• There are no warranties whatsoever made with regards to accuracy of the content.
• Any actions taken on the part of a reader based on the content provided is solely the responsibility of the reader.
• Any disparaging comments as to the content or authors of the content cannot be included in any of the presentation’s versions.

Well, so much for my legalese. If this encourages the launch of just one more stug, I’ll be happy enough.