It is with great sadness that we reported the passing of our friend Ben Landin, who died at the the age of thirty-three after a month-long illness. His obituary has since been published by his family, prompting us to update our original notification below.
Ben was the principal maintainer of the Fort Wayne Linux Users Group website for the past five years. He also usually took the initiative for scheduling events and reserving facilities for meetings, and lent his equipment, including his projector and portable desktop, so that others could make the most effective presentations possible. Ben suggested, and was instrumental in effecting, the switch from Meetup to GetTogether for event scheduling.
Ben attended Homestead High School, The Career Academy High School at Anthis, and Ivy Tech Community College - Northeast in Fort Wayne. He was most recently employed by Silicon Mountain Technologies as a systems administrator. Ben is survived by his parents, brother, and his many other relatives and friends.
Ben enjoyed online gaming, especially Minecraft, and maintained a Minecraft server, a Discord server for his friends, and numerous other servers and websites for gaming, socializing, and sharing information about free software. He was also a Dungeons & Dragons aficionado, and a regular at former Game Annex in Fort Wayne.
Ben was a staunch supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so much so that he usually overrode the objections over other leadership team members who thought we were sharing too many EFF notices and calls-to-action. It is suggested that memorials be made to the EFF by donating here. Donations to the The Trevor Project, or the FreeBSD Foundation are also suggested.
Ben deliberately designed most systems so that others could step in and maintain the site should anything ever befall him, something we jokingly used to refer to as the “hit by a bus principle.” The group has redundant domain names, so even if one of them registered in his name can’t be recovered, the leadership team will still have access to the other. There is also shared access to the Fort Wayne LUG repository.
One exigency that was not foreseen was the loss of Ben’s participation in accessing the group’s multi-signature Bitcoin wallet. Accordingly, we have removed the Bitcoin donation address from the website until we can determine if restoring access is possible.
Visitation will be held from 4-7 PM, Thursday, February 17, 2022 at Klaehn, Fahl & Melton Funeral Home, 6424 Winchester Rd, Fort Wayne, IN 46819. A funeral service will be held at Trinity English Lutheran, 450 W. Washington Blvd Fort Wayne, IN 46802, on Friday, February 18, at 11 AM, with calling one hour prior.
On behalf of the entire Fort Wayne Linux Users Group, we offer our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Ben.
]]>Similarly, the library has closed its meeting rooms. They might be available again in time for our next presentation, but they will likely impose an attendance limit, and it has long been our policy not to exclude anyone from attending our events.
While we could still hold events in a public place like a park, experts are advising everyone to avoid unnecessary public outings of any kind.
The health an well-being of our members is important to us, so we are cancelling all events until further notice. We hope you understand our reasons for doing this.
If you would like to get involved in actively helping to fight this virus, the Folding@Home project makes that possible without risking your health. If you have a computer sitting around idle, particularly one with a discrete GPU, and you can spare the electricity, visit the link below to learn how you can donate processor time to help develop a vaccine.
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When and why are we changing to a paid Meetup group?
Beginning May 5, Fort Wayne Linux Users Group will begin charging a small yearly fee of $12 to belong to our Meetup Group. We remain committed to never charging members to participate in regular group activities. But Meetup is not core to our group’s mission, and in fact we have been working for some time to provide our own alternative to Meetup. Paying the fees associated with this platform has been the single-largest expense for our group for the past several years, paid by voluntary contributions from a succession of highly committed members. We have other purposes for which this money would be better spent. Meetup remains a useful tool for keeping in touch with some of our members and recruiting new ones, but not to such a degree that it is worth upwards of $240 annually, the lion’s share of our annual budget (the next highest expenditure is approximately 2% of that number).
What is my alternative to learn about upcoming Fort Wayne LUG events?
We are excited to announce our participation on GetTogether (gettogether.community), a free online community for event sharing whose code is open-source. Please join our “team” on GetTogether at gettogether.community/fort-wayne-linux-users-group. There you will find information about all our latest events, totally for free. Even better, you can inspect the code that powers GetTogether and help contribute improvements. Check out this link if you would like to help: github.com/GetTogetherComm/GetTogether
What will you do with the money you save?
Well, first of all, our donors will keep more of their money. One of the reasons that the Meetup cost burden keeps getting passed from one member to another is that it is a considerable expense for one person to bear, and no one so far has committed to doing it forever. Currently, we do not have tax-exempt status, so contributors cannot even deduct the money they spend on our group from their taxes. Other than the volunteers who have stepped up to pay for our Meetup, our only other funding comes from the sale of donated used computer equipment, which one of the members of our leadership team has been selling on eBay. When the sale of all equipment is completed, we intend to partially reimburse our Meetup payers since August 2017 onward, and the member who has been selling the equipment (for his shipping costs). This reimbursement will be partial and will not exceed 50% of the total money raised. The remaining money will be used to pay for domain name renewals, future cloud services, and a small monthly contribution to the GetTogether project.
If I choose to remain in the Meetup group, how will that money be spent?
Even though we have made the decision to charge for Meetup to help defray the not-strictly-necessary expense of maintaining our group there, we still want to keep the amount charged as low as possible. We arrived at the amount we are charging for continued group membership by guessing at the number of people who would choose to remain versus leave the Meetup group, divided by the semi-annual amount we are billed for Meetup. If our projections are wrong, we may need to raise the amount that we charge, or we may be able to reduce it. If there is any small amount of money left over after paying Meetup and we are able to collect it, it will go into the group’s PayPal for meeting future expenses. If it is possible to refund it to members, we will do so. If it can only be applied as credit for a continued Meetup subscription, we will do that. What we will not do is use Meetup as a major revenue-generating tool. We regard Meetup as an ancillary tool for communicating with group members who are on Meetup and prefer to use it to stay in touch with us for whatever reason, and are willing to pay for it.
I don’t want to pay for Meetup, but I would like to contribute to the Fort Wayne Linux Users Group directly.
The form can be found here: fortwaynelinux.org/suggest
Unlike previous surveys, this one will remain open indefinitely.
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