Sequel: BeiMac: The Group We Couldn't Kill
Sequel: BeiMac: The Group We Couldn't Kill
- Subject: Sequel: BeiMac: The Group We Couldn't Kill
- From: David Feng (Yan Feng/馮巖) <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 21:54:24 +0800
Sequels suck*. (David, please watch that mouth!). No, seriously,
they're not as good as the original, they're kind of cheesy, they make
a cheesy story cheesier than Emmental (and you wonder why I'm Swiss in
nationality), and they... for the lack of a better word, they are less
than stellar.
But for BeiMac, they're a must.
Continuation from earlier story: by February 2004, the BeiMac group
was, to quote Roald Dahl's "The BFG", a childtime favourite of mine,
"deader than duck-soup". In line with the duckiness of the whole thing,
user group meetings were put on ice. The membership was nowhere to be
seen on Lake BeiMac. Like ice all over it, activity on the web sites
were either dormant or still splurting from bureaucratic "official
announcements". The Central Executives Committee was shocked,
electrocuted and slaughtered, fighting to its dying breath, but they
did their deed.
The phone rang one late February 2004 evening. I was nearly yelled to
death (actually, no) by a BeiMac member. He basically pleaded with me
on restarting the group. He wanted the group back.
The key to the BeiMac group (if it was a car, if you imagine the
imagery) was in my hands. I was sitting in the driver's seat. My hand
was on the key -- and the ignition set. Either turn it clockwise --
boot up, shift into gear, get the group going again -- or turn it
anticlockwise, lock the doors, and declare this group a best-efforts
replica of Tyrannosaurus Rex, MUG Version.
(And don't forget about the group funeral. No, please do NOT mimic His
Jobsness's Mac OS 9 funeral!)
Elated after some stellar events exhibiting my hidden talents as a host
(of English speech contests), I was sliced and diced -- BeiMac-wise --
at that moment -- into halves. One half of me wanted the group gone,
the other half wanted the group kept.
I chose not to kill the group.
Reality set in: despite Vostok, Antarctica-ish activity since the
failed December 2003 meeting, our online membership base continued to
grow. We couldn't just bolt the door and say, "OK guys, I'm your
President, and I've had enough of this: you are dismissed!". It wasn't
fair. It wasn't democratic, and if I wanted to pull the plug, I
couldn't secure or assure the rights of the membership weren't going to
be affected -- particularly, negatively.
I wanted to pull the trigger. I could. I didn't.
There were too many members. I couldn't kill. No matter what, the group
just couldn't go.
Then we redid the group as the BeiMac union.
BeiMac's fame shocked me. In May 2004, the President of the Beijing
Linux User Group, Michael Iannini, invited me to a tech evening.
Spamhaus was launching their Chinese website. Before the meeting got
underway, Michael introduced his BLUG and our BeiMac. At first, I
didn't know the Spamhaus guy at all.
And as soon as the Spamhaus guy started into the mike, one of the first
words he said had something to do with BeiMac. I remember our group's
name and the phrase "something great" were in one sentence without a
negation sandwiched into it.
Guys that knew nothing about our group suddenly liked it.
When BeiMac rose to Wired fame, we knew all too well that our group was
simply not an organisation we could flush-dispose of. (Needless to say,
its sheer size would jam anything up.) We knew that we had to keep the
group going, be we damned or be we not.
Those familiar with physics know a bit about half-lives. While noting
that I flunked up my AP Physics spectacularly twice (once in 1999, and
once in 2000), I now present the MUG world with the concept of
dual-lives. Yes, while Uranium decomposes and folds its presence into
halves, the opposite was happening with our group.
It was too big to kill.
It couldn't be killed.
We didn't want to kill it.
It wasn't killed.
Although we got rid of the BeiMac union and restored the BeiMac group
on October 15, 2004, we still stuck to the principle -- that BeiMac
wasn't something we could do away with.
Moral: Don't dump MUGs, even when you feel like it.
I know for groups that have seen their membership sink, that have had
their fair share of World War IIIs within their own realms, that
conditions may be different. But for dormant groups (in particular),
Don't Dump is the order of the day.
---
David Feng.
---
* I'm often not that potty-mouthed, as anyone chatting with me over
iChat may or may not have experienced. I had mixed feelings when
starting this message with such heavy words. But for impact's sake, I
left it the way they were. I'm sure that this must have rattled more
than a single, solitary bone of a reader, so if you took offence at it,
I'm here to assure you that the meaning was not undiplomatic, and I'm
sorry if you took it badly.
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