AUGD: Re: Meeting attendance
AUGD: Re: Meeting attendance
- Subject: AUGD: Re: Meeting attendance
- From: Jean Hunter <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:09:31 -0400
Hello AUGD digest readers!
On Sep 27, 2006, Allen Emory wrote:
One thing UG's can offer is recognition for well done work.
Competitions are kind of cool for that.
Think about the traditional model of the UG is an informational
meeting
once a month. This worked well when people needed to know how to get
the hardware to work and information was hard to come by. Not true
anymore. If I have a Mac connected to the internet, why in the
world am
I going to wait for a UG meeting to maybe learn a cool hack for
iMovie.
If I am motivated enough to attend a UG meeting, I am certainly
motivated enough to surf the web to find the info I need. (and I will
probably find even more)
But competitions need not be the only avenue for UG's. UG can
facilitate projects. We are currently undergoing a hugh website
redesign. It is going to be a pretty cool website but a a very
daunting
task indeed (we have our own OS X server and while it can offer many
benefits, it many demands as well) . This project itself has brought
members together. I am sure you can think of others less tedious,
maybe
a sidewalk iPhoto slideshow that various member groups have to put
together at the meeting.
So, my offers still stands, if any mugs out there want to get
excited
about something. Want to foster a since of community between UG's -
let's get something started - hey, a GB competition was just a
starting
idea.
Allen Emory
Triangle Macintosh users Group
Raleigh, NC
(too many words, I know)
Allen, all of that sounds _excellent_:
- a competitive aspect to reward work well done
- a project aspect to pull people together and get them talking to
each other and helping each other between meetings
- something to which both inexperienced users and experts can
contribute
- an aspect of "Apple pride" for want of a better word
- a sense of community both within individual user groups and among
user groups
- and maybe something bigger than all of us to support for its own
sake.
I suggest that we could hit all of these marks with a Folding@Home
distributed computing competition among user groups.
You can read about the project and about protein folding at its home
page at Stanford
http://folding.stanford.edu
and in these Apple online news articles
http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/proteinfolding/
http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/stanford/
In a nutshell, we donate our Macs' spare CPU cycles to push forward
knowledge about serious diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. The
research is first rate, with a couple of dozen papers already
published. Many of us have a personal interest in the problems being
studied, folding in honor of loved ones or in anticipation that our
work will bring a cure closer. Even inexperienced users can
contribute (unlike a GB or iMovie contest) though there are also
plenty of challenges for experts.
Concerning competition - take a look at the list of folding teams.
Mac-centric teams are ranked #11, 21, 44, 56, and 61 in the top 100
of around 3500 active teams. Not bad for 2-3% of the worldwide
market. Clicking on a team name opens a page with a link to its
website.
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats
Then visit the Team MacOSX forum (I fold with them, and we have been
recognized as a special interest AUG)
http://teammacosx.homeunix.com/forum/cgi-bin/ikonboard.pl
We are a worldwide group of Folding enthusiasts running mostly Macs
and some Win/Lin equipment as well. Any Mac running OS X at about
350 MHz or better can contribute to the effort.
Team MacOSX would be pleased to administer an AUG folding contest
(details TBD), provide technical support for new folders (as we do
anyway for Mac users project-wide), share a Folding presentation with
your user group, and provide simple prizes like t-shirts. We've also
found that the competitive and humanitarian aspects of Folding
encourage people to talk up the project to their friends and co-
workers. For a user group team or sub-team, this could mean new
opportunities to talk up the user group as well.
Yikes, too many words again! So I'll stop - but let's talk. Allen?
Others?
All the best,
Jean Hunter
Senior admin, Team MacOSX (Folding@Home Team 1971)
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