With 38 responses to the survey so far, it seemed like a good time to pull this all together into a set of graphs, and let everyone know some of the results of the survey.  We are up 8 responses from last year (we got 30 in 2008).

I threw in some random comments of mine after each of the charts.  Don't expect them to be carefully thought out, they are just first impressions based on the data.  If you want to throw in your own 2 cents, please comment on the story, I'd be happy to see others thoughts on the data.

How Long Have You Been Involved in MHVLUG?
	1 Year   8 21% 2 Years   7 18% 3 Years   7 18% 4 Years   5 13% 5 Years   5 13% since the beginning   6 16% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

This is our standard baseline question, and I'm really happy we got responses from across all years for this.  I always like it when we get a broad base of responses.

How Many Meetings did you make it to in 2009?
	0   14 37% 1   5 13% 2   2 5% 3   0 0% 4   3 8% 5   0 0% 6   3 8% 7   2 5% 8   2 5% 9   4 11% 10   3 8% 11   0 0% 12   0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Over a 1/3 of our members didn't make it out to a lecture this year. I used to take this personally, but I do get that everyone has different schedules, priorities, etc. I'm just happy at this point that MHVLUG provides enough of a resource for those folks to continue to participate in other forums.

We had 2 good comments on this front as well. The first was a request to list the Lightning talks in the email announce if they are known in advance. We'll definitely try to give that a shot. The second was a request to stream some of the meetings. I'm going to experiment with that with the Git meeting in January and see how it goes.

How far do you come to get to MHVLUG Meetings?
	0 - 5 miles   5 13% 5 - 10 miles   13 34% 10 - 15 miles   5 13% 15 - 20 miles   4 11% 20+ miles   11 29% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

This was a new question, designed to figure out how much distance was an impact on people coming to events.  It definitely affects things, but 4 out of the 11 20+ mile respondants did come to meetings, some to many.  If I get time I'll corolate this with the attendance, though given the small numbers, I'm not sure it really will be statistically significant.  For those that make the trek, I appreciate the dedication.

How would you identify yourself?
	Hobbyist   10 26% End User   4 11% Systems Administrator   10 26% Developer   9 24% Other   5 13% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

The rule of thumb over the years has been to attempt to have the lectures go 1/3 each for Development, Admin, and End User.  That's probably still appropriate.  I think next year I'd like to add a question on what kinds of talks would you like to see more of.  This tells us where we are at, but not really where we should go.  As with all polling you realize there were much better questions to ask after you've got your first run of poll data.

Which of the following social tools do you use?
	Google Calendar   17 45% Facebook   24 63% Twitter   14 37% MySpace   3 8% Yahoo Groups   13 34% Meetup   7 18% Ning   0 0% Linked In   10 26% Other   10 26% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

In 2009 we started making webbased ical available and established a Facebook group.  I was very curious if people were making use of those, as well as other social networking tools.  WIth > 60% of respondants using Facebook... good call there.  Nearly 1/2 are using Google calendar, which led to me adding the "Add to Google Calendar" button to the event calendar.  We've got a lot of folks on Twitter as well, which would be nice to make more use of.  I know Ben and I tend to tweet as we are headed to meetings or events, but maybe there is something more to be done there.

What flavors of Linux do you use?
	Ubuntu   27 77% Debian   9 26% Red Hat   11 31% Fedora   9 26% Suse   6 17% Gentoo   3 9% Mandriva   7 20% Other   7 20% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

As we figure out any talks that might be distro specific, this is a go question to ask.  3/4 of the respondants are using Ubuntu.  I think a deb or Ubuntu configuration talk in 2010 would probably make sense.

What was your favorite meeting this year?

Ruby on Rails (Feb)   5 14% What is my computer doing (Mar)   3 8% Amazon Web Services (Apr)   1 3% Lost Art of Assembly Programming (May)   0 0% Linux Virtualization (Jun)   1 3% Linux in High Performance Computing (Jul)   1 3% Puppet (Aug)   4 11% HDTV & Linux (Sep)   2 6% Glade (Oct)   2 6% Google Wave (Nov)   3 8% MythTV (Dec)   5 14% None/NA   9 25% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

First, I like how spread out the results are.  While there are clearly some peaks, lots of people liked lots of different things.  I'm quite happy that we didn't have more than 15% on any one meeting, as it means different ones are getting different draws.

What was your LEAST favorite meeting this year?
	Ruby on Rails (Feb)   0 0% What is my computer doing (Mar)   1 3% Amazon Web Services (Apr)   1 3% Lost Art of Assembly Programming (May)   2 6% Linux Virtualization (Jun)   1 3% Linux in High Performance Computing (Jul)   2 6% Puppet (Aug)   0 0% HDTV & Linux (Sep)   1 3% Glade (Oct)   1 3% Google Wave (Nov)   0 0% MythTV (Dec)   0 0% None/NA   25 74%

The vast majority didn't have anything they particularly didn't like, and we had a smattering of responses across other meetings.  I consider this a pretty good set of results, as I reallize not everything is everyone's cup of tea, but also that we didn't just piss everyone off at one meeting.

Free Form Comments

There were a couple of questions at the end that allowed for free form.  The first was on future topic ideas.  I tried to copy and paste just about everything from there out onto the Future Meetings Ideas page.  If you are interested, scroll down to the bottom.  A theme I took out of that was there was interest in more Admin oriented items.  Not being an Admin myself, trying to figure out what the right level of talk there is tough.  Puppet seemed to have gone over well, but that was the only piece of tech that dove deep into traditional IT management stuff this year.  I'd love to get more of the Admin crowd in and discussing some of their tools and tricks.  Commercial software that drives Linux is fair game, not everything has to be open.

On the "how do you find out about local events?" question we got 4 main responses: the mailing list, the ACM group, the Poughkeepsie Journal, and word of mouth.  The actionable bit I can take from that is to make sure to get our events posted in the Poughkeepsie Journal, as people will find us from there.  Perhaps it's time to reup on our flyer for the LUG as well and try to get that posted up at Libraries again.

Lastly, on the "any other feedback" front we got a lot of at-a-boys, which is appreciated.  It's a good energy recharge to know so many folks.

To everyone that participated in the Survey: Thank You!  It's really helpful to get some sense of a pulse of what people are interested in and what's working.  Additional comments are very much welcome, especially if you want to sign up for a talk. ;)