MUG Online Chats?
MUG Online Chats?
- Subject: MUG Online Chats?
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:19:58 -0400
Hi All!
I am curious to hear the opinions of other MUG leaders relative to what
I perceive to be a rather low participation rate in the two monthly
MUG-targeted Online Chats which are held over on the World Without
Borders web site. Trish Huffman does a terrific job in moderating these
chats, and we often have Chuck Joiner of the MUG Center stirring up the
place, and I generally try to make every session depending on my
schedule and the odd time when I simply fall asleep after dinner and
fail to wake up in time to login. (I'm in the Eastern time zone.)
For the past year or more, my experience has been that there may be
only a single digit number of participants, including Trish and Chuck,
on any given evening. As I say, I probably make at least half of the
sessions, our friend from Beijing used was a pretty regular attendee
for quite a long time before he perhaps took a good look at his watch
and decided that SLEEP was a more vital requirement, and lately we have
often had someone from the United Kingdom join in despite a similar
problem with the time zones. But often there are only a handful of
participants from the U.S. of A.
Here in Canada, we often use the 10% rule to describe a lot of our
measures compared to the U.S. We have a pretty big hunk of geography,
but we have only about 10% of the population of the U.S., and most
other things you might want to measure like number of Mac User Groups
probably follow the same ratio. I think Apple shows 40 to 50 MUG's in
Canada on their database, although I've only been able to ratify about
35.
So I figure there should logically be about a ten to one ratio of
Americans to Canadians participating in the User Group targeted online
chats. The ratio is only 3 or 4 to one many nights.
It is not just the ratio that is off. The TOTAL participation seems low
when I compare it to the large number of highly dedicated and
enthusiastic MUG Execs which I run into at Macworld Expos or which I
see contributing to this very AUGD mail list. So I wonder why the
participation rate seems low in this area when I know it's certainly
not for lack of enthusiasm about the subject of MUG's and their issues.
I have some ideas why participation in online chats may be lower, which
I can list below. Maybe some of you could chime in and confirm whether
any of these affect YOU, and at the same time maybe you can add other
issues which have not yet occurred to me.
Some reasons which have occurred to me are:
1 - some folks find online text chats frustrating because they or
others have relatively slow keyboarding skills, i.e. a lot of time is
invested for a relatively small amount of information exchanged;
2 - if chats are not moderated well (something I do not believe is true
here!), online text chats can be confusing because several discussion
streams can get initiated simultaneously;
3 - the TIMING of the sessions is not suitable, i.e. too close to
dinner hour in the west or too close to bedtime in the east;
4 - one doesn't find that they are getting value out of the time
invested; or
5 - people somehow miss any emails or announcements and just become
unaware that the chats are occurring.
6 - Oh yes, one last possibility: People are just too BUSY with other
stuff! (I have to admit that I retired on August 1st, so perhaps some
would argue that I now have more TIME to participate. All I can say to
that idea is wait until YOU retire and see if you still think you have
more time!)
Sorry for the lengthy diatribe ... it's an occupational hazard ever
since my dear ol' Mom taught me how to touch-type when I was very
young. She never foresaw computers coming - she just thought it might
be a handy skill in my later school years for getting papers turned in
on time without having to pay someone else to type them!
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
http://www.mause.ca
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