Welcome to the Ubuntu Maryland Team's Wiki page.

A Gathering

We now have a place and time for the first in person meeting of the Maryland Ubuntu LOCO group! It will be on Saturday March 31 at the [http://www.gbhc.org Greater Baltimore Hamboree and Computerfest] show in Timonium, MD [http://www.google.com/maps?q=2200+York+Rd,+Lutherville+Timonium,+MD+21093&ie=UTF8&z=15&ll=39.447892,-76.628351&spn=0.012494,0.043259&om=1&iwloc=addr at the fairgrounds]. We will be meeting in the Exhibition Hall meeting room from 11am until 12 noon.

My expectations for this meetup are to get to know each other a bit. Discuss ideas of what the broad goals of the Maryland group should be. I want to see what level of participation people are willing to give. What resources we can gather together to work from? Does anyone have any projects or organizations that we can help with in particular via our F/OSS ideals and resources?

I will have a very limited amount of Canonical provided Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CDs. I'm planning to have ISO's of the 6.06 (Dapper) and 6.10 (Edgy) Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu releases to burn as requested and as time allows.

In addition we'll be doing a [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GnuPrivacyGuardHowto Key Signing] for anyone wishing to build up their GPGKey web of trust. So be sure to bring your gpg fingerprint printed on a piece of paper and government issued photo ID. If you intend to participate and want to [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChuckFrain send me] your key early I'll build a separate keyring and provide a list for those people.

About the Gathering

Since I've been asked, I'll answer for all to read. There will be a fee ($6 according to the [http://www.gbhc.org website]) to get into the HamFest, but there is no additional charge for us to gather together. I decided on this venue for a first meeting due to the already present gathering point that many computer enthusiasts will be at anyway. The 11am time slot was chosen for two reasons. The main reason is that it was available for a full hour. The other was that it seems like after being at the show for a few hours it'll be nice to rest a bit and chat.

In the future we will be having meetings in a public, cost free facility. We've been [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=386357 offered a room] at the [http://hclibrary.org/ Howard County Library] already. I'm also going to be announcing the initial 'official' [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=391569 IRC meeting] in the near future.

Please feel free to [https://launchpad.net/~chuckfrain contact me] as needed on this or any other matter.

The Basics

Currently we are getting things together and organized.

As of now, we have the following things ready:

1. [http://www.ubuntu-maryland.org] redirects to this page.

2. #ubuntu-maryland is registered for an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

3. A mailing list has been requested.

4. A forum on [http://maryland.ubuntuforums.org ubuntuforums.org] has been started.

5. A team contact has been named in the form of myself, [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChuckFrain Chuck Frain].

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChuckFrain contact me]. I will be doing more with this page, but want to get the basics out there for people in Maryland to be aware that we are working to build a team here.