Interest Groups

The annual Interest Group Convener's meeting is to be held on Saturday 28th April at Chadstone, chaired as usual by Bill Dair in his role as Interest Groups Coordinator. The meeting is open to all group coordinators and this year's agenda includes reports from group conveners, PC Update and group contributions, new Guidelines for Conveners for running groups, services and equipment available to groups and changes that are being made to promotions and advertising.

The Conveners of our interest groups do a fantastic job and ensure that each meeting is structured to give members the best of information on their chosen subject matter. One of the greatest challenges, especially for the groups that operate outside of Chadstone, is finding good guest speakers and researching topics that are relevant to the groups. For a long time now I have wanted to have a central collection of presentations that could be used by Interest Groups, wherever they meet.

Wynford Connick from the Essendon Daytime Group has for many years researched and developed a number of excellent presentations for that particular group. He has now provided me with a selection of them that could also be easily used by other interest groups. It is hoped that this collection could be the start of a "database" of presentations that could be accessed by Group Conveners.

If you have any presentations that have been developed for your group, please feel free to add them to the database or you might be interested in obtaining some of them to show to your group. Either way please contact the office, (03)9567-8000.

Lifestyle Group

A meeting is to be held on Friday 13th April at 6.30 pm at Chadstone to discuss the formation of this new group and the format it should take. A couple of members have stepped forward and offered to assist as conveners; this will be a great help in getting the group started.

As discussed previously in PC Update the group will cover many different topics but they will all be aimed at healthy living, aging well and remaining fit and active. Yes, even active PC users need to do this. As we age we need to adapt and do things differently and there's a wealth of good advice that can be gleaned from Web sites all over the world. If you'd like to join in, please contact me.

Talking about changes to lifestyle, there have been a few recent changes to our Internet Lounge! The whole experiment has been a great success with members vying for places to access the Internet whilst away from home. For this purpose we will be introducing a ticketing system for members wishing to access the Internet from the Lounge. Local use of scanners, printers, etc, is unaffected and will not require tickets. The Internet PCs have also now been linked to the Hotspot LAN and this will mean faster connection speeds. In the Milling area a security camera has been realigned to cover the Internet PCs, as this now becomes more of a valuable resource. New signs and policies have also been developed to cover members' usage of the area.

There have also been changes to our serviced offices with the installation of a new ADSL connection. Tenants have recently been transferred onto the new link and speeds should be faster for them too.

Swap Meets

Following on with more changes, we had a recent change in committee membership. Andrea Blain has accepted a casual vacancy, after the resignation of Scouse and she has taken on the Swap Meet portfolio with great enthusiasm. The volunteers who promote the work of Melb PC at Swap Meets do so as self-managed teams, with support from committee as appropriate. Not only do they promote the Group each month, but they also answer a wide range of PC related questions from would-be members.

As anyone who has visited a Swap Meet knows, they are usually busy places and we have long needed to raise our profile at these types of event. Andrea will work closely with the Marketing team to freshen up our approach. Swap Meet teams will be provided with professional looking brochures and fliers, that ensure that the information given out about our club and the Interest Groups is up to date and of good quality.

The Marketing team has also been busy redesigning our Training and Room Hire brochures. We now have swish looking, corporate branded brochures that promote our services to members and the outside world. If you're interested, or know someone that is, ask the office to let you have a copy of the latest brochures.

If you are interested in helping out with Swap Meets, or have some good ideas about what could be improved, then please contact Andrea in the first instance.

The Committee welcomes all feedback, contact me at president@melbpc.org.au or the office Ph: (03)9567 8000.

Reprinted from the April 2007 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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