Today I was installing a small Cisco 805 router for a company, and while I was waiting for the ISP company to straighten out the problems on their end, I was thinking about what to write about in this month’s Tech Talk and President's Thoughts columns. Since I was doing a fractional T1 at the time, I decided to talk about optional connection interfaces in my Tech Talk column. As far as the President's column, I couldn’t think what to write. I even wrote next month’s Tech Talk without knowing what to write this month. I keep thinking that I have to talk about the group and where it is headed. So part of this will be about the group.
We have lost a couple of great people over the years and for the most part, we have got great people to replace them. Just recently we lost our Membership Chairman and by luck we already have a replacement. This group is run by volunteers and continues to succeed through those volunteers. Volunteers are always welcome anytime and I encourage anyone just to show up at our steering committee meeting to listen and see how the group makes decisions. Getting involved brings benefits and sometimes free software.
I was asked by a mass e-mail message to the club to be a potential beta tester for a company called Serious Magic, who is the spin off of Play corporation. If I were not involved with this user group, I would not have some of the software that I have because of the exposure that the club has given software companies. Software companies look at user groups because they are usually filled with most knowledgeable people.
Another thing about user groups is that people all have a common goal to educate one another about the new and upcoming developments in the industry. Then club members go on to their work places and talk to their coworkers about what they learned in the club. It sort of propagates down and soon the amount of people that are touched by the user group is double or triple the size of the group. So with this note, I would like to suggest that you tell people that you know about the group and recommend that they show up and see what the group is all about.
The size of the group also makes a difference as well. If we got to a size of 1500 or more members and we had audiences of 400 or more, we would have larger companies interested in coming out to show off their products. We were there once. We have had Bill Gates at our meeting three times. We were the only user group that had Andy Grove from Intel come to any user group meeting. Philippe Kahn, who created Borland, came several times, as well as Gordon Eubanks from Symantec. Even John Warnick from Adobe came. I would like to make the group a stronger force in the industry as well as a leader in the community again. So spread the word that the Sacramento PC Users Group is back on track and we are setting a goal to be large again.
