Re: Program topics and who presents them
Re: Program topics and who presents them
- Subject: Re: Program topics and who presents them
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 19:49:14 -0500
On 25-Mar-04, at 7:14 PM, Trish Huffman wrote:
I'm wondering...who presents program topics in your group? The same
person
each time? Different members? Outside presenters?
Over the past few years, the majority of presentations have been made
by myself, President of the User Group. Let's say 65%. Another 15% have
been done by outside speakers, and 20% by other members of the User
Group.
This has NOT been by design, by rather by lack of success in getting
other people to volunteer to be speakers or even to organize a
presentation using a third party speaker.
If it is the same person each month, does that person pick the topic?
It has often been the case that the final decision about the meeting
topic ("So, what are we doing at this month's meeting?") would come out
of our club's Executive Meeting held about 3 weeks prior to the member
meeting night. Once again this was not by design but rather due to lack
of success in more long range planning.
Since the Executive was often only marginally more prepared to provide
substantive help than the members, it was often the case that a
decision was delegated to the President.
What would often happen would be something like the President saying,
"Well, I suppose I could do something on iPhoto...", which would be
immediately followed by unanimous and boisterous approval of the
Executive, and universal relief that this thorny issue had been
resolved for yet another month.
If it is different members, do those members pick their own topics?
Well, in the case of presentations done by other members of the club, I
would have to say that most times the member would have volunteered to
talk about a specific topic of interest to him or her. Even in cases
where a member has done successful presentations in the past and we
approach that member again to see if they would be prepared to do
another presentation this or next month, it would usually be left up to
the member to decide on the exact topic.
How are your topics chosen?
Again, in the past, meeting agenda topics were 95% determined by the
Executive, despite frequent statements to the membership that their
input and suggestions were welcome. We simply did not get much input
and even less in the way of actual volunteers to do any work.
This year, right now, we are trying to follow a different tactic, using
the guidelines proposed in a seminar that was held at the San Francisco
User Group University. We are at the point where we have mailed out (by
snail mail) to all our paid up members a listing of about twenty
potential meeting topics and we are asking for their input to either
add more topics to the list or to edit in some way the ones that are
already there. We are NOT asking them to vote just yet, but instead to
help us craft a better list of topics which everyone will then have an
opportunity to vote on hopefully at our April meeting. So far, the
responses to this communication have been sparse but we are not falling
on our swords just yet because ANY input from the membership is better
than what we have had in the past.
Like many groups, we are facing the OS X versus non-OS X divide which
is separating our members into two distinct blocks. We have been
hearing more and more "complaints", primarily from the non-OS X group,
that our meeting topics are "over their head". We even get this from
some of our OS X users who really only got into OS X because they just
bought a new Mac. So one way we are trying to approach this criticism
is to say, "Well, you need to give us an idea of exactly what it is
that you WOULD like us to present rather than just telling us that we
are too advanced for you."
Hopefully we will make some progress in the next few months.
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
http://www.mause.ca
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