Fwd: AUGD: Disc of the Month (DotM) contents
Fwd: AUGD: Disc of the Month (DotM) contents
- Subject: Fwd: AUGD: Disc of the Month (DotM) contents
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:16:37 -0400
Oops! Sent the original only to Nicolas, when I meant to send it to
both he and the list.
Jim Foster
Begin forwarded message:
From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
Date: July 18, 2006 3:14:38 PM EDT (CA)
To: Nicholas Pyers <email@hidden>
Subject: Re: AUGD: Disc of the Month (DotM) contents
On 18-Jul-06, at 12:43 PM, Nicholas Pyers wrote:
I thought it appropriate to ask what sort of content do groups
put on their Discs of the Month.
Our MUG attempts to produce a CD each month. It is free, but only
for paidup members of the club. Another "condition" which we have
managed to implement without any problem is that it is only
available for pickup at the actual monthly meeting, NOT as
something to be mailed out if you miss a meeting. I know this might
sound a little strange, even unfair, but it evolved because the
whole notion of a monthly CD was an experiment to begin with. I was
not sure just how popular this item would be so, for the first
attempt, I only made up a handful of copies. Our MUG does not have
a CD Duplicator, so making CD's and then printing labels directly
onto these inkjet printable CD's does take 15 to 20 minutes per CD.
Our club currently has about 60 members, of which we sometimes see
30 to 35 at club meetings. For the past six months or so, I find
that if I make up 25 copies of the CD of the month, I will still
have a few copies left at the end of the meeting. Members are
encouraged to pickup a CD from me either at the mid meeting break
or at the end of the meeting, and one of our meeting presentation
slides summarizes what is on each new CD.
So far, I would have to say that the CD is very popular with those
people who make a practice of picking up a copy each month,
obviously lesser so for those who do not. Some of the people who
are regular takers appreciate the fact that, if they miss a
meeting, there is often a spare copy of the previous month's CD
still available when they come to the next meeting. I have not
investigated the reasons why some attending members do not ask for
a CD, but expect it would begin with the fact that they don't have
a CD player and might extend to people who perhaps got one in the
past and then ran into problems accessing the files. A lot of the
material on the CD is in the latest QuickTime format, in PDF
format, or in some compresssed format - not generally a problem for
people with fairly modern Macs but possibly an issue for older
machines.
Some of the material we include on each CD is specifically club
material. For example, we use a KeyNote slide presentation to guide
us through each month's meeting presentation so we include on each
CD a PDF version of the prior month's KeyNote presentation. We also
produce our monthly newsletter in PDF format, making it available
for download from our web site, but we still find a lot of people
don't download it before the meeting, so we include on the CD a
print-optimized and a screen-optimized version of the current
month's newsletter.
We will certainly be adding Breen's Bungalow back to our CD.
If memory serves me correct, the old version of Chuck Joiner's User
Group Report was eligible to be distributed by User Groups to their
members, and I think we used to do so on our monthly CD. I will
have to check whether it is OK to include the newly revived User
Group Report.
As for the remainder of each month's CD, we have little difficulty
finding material. We have a number of members who, while they have
fairly modern Macintosh hardware, do not have access to broadband
Internet access, so this puts them into a situation where there are
often some very sizeable downloads which they would like to have
but which are problematic for them. Unfortunately, the producers of
such files do not always permit distribution of this material by
such means as a User Group CD, sometimes for reasons which are not
entirely unreasonable, but I suspect that this sometimes pushes
User Groups into an "easier to get forgiveness than permission"
situation. Not that OUR group would ever do anything so
controversial, of course.
Recently, some members of our MUG started up a Photoshop/Photoshop
Elements SIG. I have not been able to attend many of its SIG
meetings, but I did make up a CD of Photoshop Resources that was
distributed to the ten or so attendees at the last SIG meeting and
was apparently well received. There is a podcast called something
like PhotoShop TV which comes out about once a week, available
through the iTunes Music Store. It is about 100 Megs per episode.
As a means of promoting this resource and encouraging the SIG
members to set this podcast up in their own iTunes program, I
included 4 episodes on that CD. I am not absolutely sure that it
was legal to do this, but as I say our intent was to drive our SIG
Members to the original source rather than to "steal" the online
material.
Obviously, our MUG is enthusiastic about trying to continue a CD of
the Month approach while always looking for ways to reduce the time
and effort necessary to produce and distribute it. I am interested
in any other MUG's experiences in this regard.
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
Ph: (905) 263-4167
Email: email@hidden
http://www.mause.ca
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