The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group APCUG Report - November 2002 Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
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The User Group For The User Groups
Everyone who joins Melbourne PC has his or her own reason. What was yours? Perhaps you wanted some advice on buying a computer. Or you wanted to meet others who were interested in your favourite topic. Perhaps you wanted access to the Internet. Or maybe you just felt bewildered, standing in the huge, strange world of computers, as we all did when we started. Whatever it was, you needed some understanding and support.
By joining our group you found 10,000 other members at every level of knowledge and understanding. And you found the support you were seeking.
Well user groups themselves get a bit lonely at times - even big ones like ours. We need to talk to others who share our goals and problems, who perhaps have already worked out the answers to tasks that are giving us a headache. For this reason, user groups have their own club. It's big, it's international, and Melbourne PC is a well-established, well-respected member. It's called the Association of Personal Computer User Groups, Inc., the APCUG or as you get used to calling it: "Apsug"
The Association has its main meeting once a year, held in Las Vegas to coincide with the big Comdex computer show. This way they can guarantee to have all the big names and top vendors available for the meeting. The grand event happened last November and as always Melb PC had its representatives present, in this case President George Skarbek and this writer, committee member Ray Beatty.
George is a seasoned hand at these meetings but for me it was a very new experience. Being based in the US, of course the majority of the delegates came from the States. The closer they live, the more participants seemed to be the rule - there were 16 from the Las Vegas Group, eight from Dayton Ohio, six from San Francisco and two from New York. All together APCUG has 361 groups, the foreigners present were from Tokyo, Canada - and us.
Set in the huge Orleans Hotel (in Vegas all hotels are "huge" - the city has nine of the ten biggest hotels in America) the conference was right in the heart of the action - on the floors below us the slot machines beeped, the roulette wheels spun, the crap games rattled - it was the full Ocean's 11.
However, delegates to APCUG and Comdex are extremely unpopular here, we were told - they do very little gambling and are stingy with tips. But hey, if you spend half your life staring at a screen trying to make some obstinate program work why would you want to spend your leisure staring at spinning cherries and oranges? And - who ever gave a gratuity in a computer club?
APCUG was good at persuading the computing giants to buy everyone breakfast or lunch, and put on a first-rate presentation. So we had vendors like Intel, ZD Media, and JASC (the Paint Shop Pro people). Handspring - developers of the Treo palmtop computer - were represented by their founding President, and Microsoft sent along the manager of their Mindshare User Group Support Program, Alan Chitlik. You'd better believe I pinned him down about getting more Microsoft support for our Melbourne monthly meetings.
Mind you we also got to see his boss. Not that I was able to have an intimate tete a tete - the Bill Gates talk was to a stadium of about 5,000 people and he had better security than the US President - no more custard pies for this boy! Microsoft supplied buses to take APCUG members from the Orleans to the MGM Grand Hotel stadium which was designed for its main purpose: setting world heavyweight title fights. But then I suppose Gates is as heavyweight as they get, in the computer world.
As for the APCUG conference, every day featured "round tables" where between 30 and 50 members from the user groups would discuss common goals and problems, starting with a presentation by a moderator. One of the first tasks for George and I was to decide who was going to go to which meeting - it would have been a waste to double up at one and miss the other three. As a result we saw each other at breakfast and in the corridors between meetings but otherwise it was every man for himself.
The Downunder Heavyweight
The round table on user group newsletters was eye-opening. Now don't think me smug or anything but as the other groups talked about their 16-page photocopied newsletters and how they were putting out a couple of dozen special copies in colour, I had to humbly mumble that our Melbourne newsletter was 64 pages full colour throughout, with the third-largest circulation of all the computer magazines in our state. I felt like I was Rupert Murdoch who'd walked into the room.
In the conference common room a table had been set aside for displays of every club's newsletter. Every day I put out a pile of 60 PC Updates, and every day they all were snapped up by lunchtime.
What did come out of the discussions is the importance of the newsletter to every club. It is the lifeblood of the group - tales were told of small clubs where the editor quit and the magazine wasn't published for several months. Such clubs had a hard time surviving and could just disintegrate.
Marketing The Group
Marketing your user group was another discussion I attended. In the area of regular attendance at swap meets, good membership literature, value and a free CD when they join; we are well in with the leaders. But in our communications to the general community - to newspapers, computer stores, public radio, schools - many of the smaller US groups are much more on the ball than we are.
Presentations, at monthly meetings and SIG meetings, made another topic of special interest for me. We are all having the same problems, world-wide. There are less medium-sized software companies around; companies don't have the money to spend flying presenters round the country; and getting door prizes out of them is akin to drawing blood from stones. So having 40 of us meeting conveners swapping ideas and tales and experiences was invaluable.
I like the idea of taking a photo of the audience and e-mailing it to the vendor. (I should have won the Nikon Coolpix that was given away in December, Gary!). There were some suggestions for getting in the younger crowd - this is a problem we all have, too much grey hair. So expect some presentations on subjects like instant messaging, chat rooms and hacking - can we draw in younger members? We can only try.
Computer Charity
As convener of ComputerAid, which sources used PCs, upgrades and fixes them, then passes them on to World Vision and other charities, I was excited by The National Christina Foundation. This is an organisation which has passed literally millions of computers to charity in the US over the past 10 years. Their presentation to APCUG showed an exciting, wide-ranging project with enormous support from the computer industry and the corporate world.
Talking to Yvette Marrin, the NCF President, I found a determined, dynamic woman who was reaching out to the disabled, the schools, the ghettoes and providing them with the computers and training they need to catch up with the world. I'll be following them up closely over the coming months - especially the deals they have struck with software companies like Microsoft to make software available on a pro bono basis. As I get to know more about them, I will write about it in this magazine in coming months.
And The Little Surprises..
APCUG was full of surprises, too. Like discussing the next day's round tables and which we would attend, over dinner with George. "George, are you going to 'Programs for the New Millennium'?" "Oh I don't know, there are other important discussions..." "Well George, here in the programs it has the presenter as a certain George Skarbek..." From across the table came an anguished cry.
It turned out that there had been e-mail discussion some months before about the subject but George was not informed that he had been put down as co-presenter. Obviously some communications glitch between the continents. Overnight George scribbled some hasty notes in case he was called on, but fortunately they could manage without him.
Spreading The Message
As anyone who has been to America knows well, the majority of Americans are very unaware of the rest of the world. Let's face it there is so much happening in their own country that everything outside it pales in significance. The delegates at APCUG were not all that different from their countrymen. They were very politely aware of the rest of us but the interest was only flickering.
Well I think APCUG is a great organisation but what it really needs is more breadth. So I'm making a new year's resolution to get interest in it from other parts of the world - there's no good reason why the UK clubs shouldn't be there, or the rest of Europe.
Tell me, do any of you have regular contact with European user groups? I'd like to get any contacts you can offer and start to explore that side of the world.
Then in another year or two we may finally have a truly international Association of PC User Groups.
Reprinted from the February 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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