This seems like a misleading title. The SVLUG isn't closing, it's just their last meeting at Symantec. It seems they don't have another meeting place set up formally yet, but I see no indication that the group is actually closing at all.
SVLUG's had three generous tentative offers of meeting space, thanks in part to the good folks here. The somewhat bigger problem is SVLUG's staffing, notably its absence. As a member of the Web Team, I've been holding the group together for years after active volunteers found other interests elsewhere and walked away, e.g., Yudhvir Singh Sidhu resigned as Meeting Coordinator after doing a terrific job for years, and nobody took his place. This past January, I gave the group a heads-up that the March 2nd speaker had cancelled but I was going to be on the Pacific Ocean for a month so someone else would have to fill the vacancy. I returned in late February and found nobody had even tried, and March's meeting had to be cancelled.<p>SVLUG hasn't had elected officers since 2009, when the last President and VP's terms expired. Nominations were open at the December 2nd, 2009 meeting, but nobody wished to be a candidate.<p>I'm certainly not faulting people for having other interests. These things happen. (I myself always stressed that I was unwilling to run SVLUG because I already run another LUG, CABAL.) I suspect that if speakers show an interest in giving talks, one of the kind offers will be accepted, but the basic institutional problem within the group is a real one.
Reads like a facility issue, not the ending of the group. Having run user groups, this is a common challenge, but hardly a death knell. However, maybe there's a backstory I don't know.
>"If you or
someone else claims the November slot, then our closing party will be
December 7th, 2016 -- a day that will live in infamy? ;->"<p>Long live the history nerd!
So can anyone here from SVLUG confirm whether they have a new venue lined up? If not I can make some enquiries about possibilities in our facilities in South San Jose.
So now that the confusion about SVLUG closing has been removed and nothing serious is going on, this reminds me of exciting times loooong ago, when Marc Andreessen spoke at SVLUG and then Netscape had buses waiting outside to drive everyone (who didn't want to drive themselves) to San Francisco's "Sound Factory" for the Netscape (open source) release party [0]. I also remember Linus Torvalds as speaker. At one of the meetings I won a SCSI card - which I gifted to the "student network" of my (German) university, a network created by and administered by students in 1994, connecting several thousand students in dormitories to the 155 Mbit ATM backbone of the university. I don't remember a time without high-speed Internet all the way to my room, it's always been there...<p>Since I moved out of the Bay Area in 2004 I don't have any more recent memories :)<p>[0] <a href="http://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/1998/details.html" rel="nofollow">http://www-archive.mozilla.org/party/1998/details.html</a>