Thought I might try this for a Users Group website. Might work, might not. :)
What's up with the group?
Well, not much. Things are moving much slower than I thought they would. A few years ago at a mini-TechPeak with about 40 people in attendance, pretty much everyone raised their hands high when asked if they wanted to restart the users group. We've had 4 official meetings this year and at most we had 6 people attend. Maybe I'm not doing my job as President well enough.
In January 2006 I will be heading back to Bedford for a PUG Presidents meeting at Progress. Hopefully I'll learn some good ideas for getting our group going better.
As for meetings, I was trying to do one meeting every quarter, but that hasn't seemed to work well. I think one problem is where we are meeting, which has been my office. I really believe people would like to meet somewhere, a nice restaurant, pub, etc, where they can have some food and drink (beer, wine, soda, etc). The problem with that is we have no money to reserve anywhere. Just having a meeting in the middle of the restaurant wouldn't work well. I know some groups only have one formal meeting a year, right after Exchange. Maybe we need to go to that instead?
Some groups also charge dues and some don't. I would like to mainly so we can afford to meet places. We would have corporate memberships of like $200/year, and individual memberships of like $25/year. For the corporate memberships, anyone at the company could attend. We would never say if you aren't a paid member you can't attend. What being a paid member gets you is the ability to take part in raffles, discounts on training and Exchange, things like that. For example, if we had a lot of people who wanted to take a certain class, we could probably get Progress to come out here for free and give it. Members would get a discount on the class, non-members pay full price. Other groups have said this works well for them.
I have also been having little gatherings each month in between our formal meetings just as a way for people to talk about Progress, computers, users, cars, the weather, whatever. These were not anything formal. However, I think people were seeing these as a "meeting", and thus not showing up to the real meeting. SO, from now on, I will still be doing this, but they will simply be me wanting to go to a nice pub, have some food, beer, and anyone is welcome to join me. We will probably talk about Progress since that's our common bond, but we'll also talk about all kinds of other things. We won't really be talking about the users group at all, though it might come up.
I'll be going to Exchange again in 2006. We will have a formal meeting after Exchange for me (and anyone else who went) to share what went on, what new things are coming, what were the big topics, etc.
If you have any questions, comments, thoughts, suggestions, etc, about the users group, please let me know! I'm here not as a dictator but a facilitator, to make this users group work the way YOU want it to work. Whatever you would like, I am more than happy to do everything I can to make it happen.
Later!
Rich
