End of year and AGM

First of all I would like to extend my thanks to all committee members this year who have contributed to the management and administration of Melb PC. Your voluntary work is invaluable. My thanks and best wishes for the future also go to those retiring committee members who have decided for one reason or another to give up the rigours of committee work. You will be missed.

John Swale and Bill Dair in particular have spent many years on committee and the club is indebted to them for their hard work and the strong dedication they have shown. John has filled the role of Secretary, Public Officer, Office liaison and Legal liaison where this has been necessary. Bill has been the Interest Group Coordinator ever since I've known him, he's an active Ripper Interest Group member and he also plays a large part in the technical management of the monthly meetings. Their shoes will be hard to fill.

I would also like to thank the other committee members who have given their time in service to the club. The spill of executive and ordinary committee members this year has been high, with only two of the existing committee members nominating for committee positions for next year.

At the close of nominations at 5 PM on Friday 26 September 2008, there were only FOUR nominations for the 12 Committee positions. As such there will be no need for an election this year at the AGM. With our membership falling to approx 7,250, this is a very disappointing result.

One nomination was received for the position of President (Keith Younger), one for Vice- President (Barry Carle) and two nominations (Terry Kemp and Michael Poloni) for the eight General (ordinary) Committee positions. These nominees will be declared elected at the AGM, by Doug Brooke our Returning Officer. Our thanks go to Doug who is officiating again this year.

As the four nominees will be able to form a quorum it will be their task to fill the remaining casual vacancies and create the committee for 2008-2009. Filling the casual vacancies of Secretary and Treasurer will be important for the group to function properly. Filling the casual, general committee positions will be important to share the portfolio workload. If you have any committee experience and wish to contribute to the development of our Group, please contact Keith Younger at treasurer@melbpc.org.au or John Swale at secretary@melbpc.org.au as soon as possible to express your interest.

Adobe Partnership

Mid September saw the pre-announcement session by Adobe of its new Creative Suite 4 (CS4).

CS4 is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications made by Adobe Systems and reported on in this column last month. Adobe announced that Creative Suite 4 was to be released in October 2008. We were invited to attend the session and John Hall attended on behalf of Melb PC. Our Video Editing interest group has been waiting eagerly for the new product and John has been working with the Adobe team to ensure our new partnership with Adobe is successful for all. You might be interested in looking at a commercial on-line learning service at www.lynda.com.

We have also invited Adobe to present at one of our monthly meetings and David Hague our Editor, has also been included in communications between Melb PC and Adobe. We sincerely hope that with the formation of this new partnership we can continue to build on the new relationship between Adobe and Melb PC and that our members can benefit by learning about the new product and improved features of the new release.

Your committee welcomes the chance to provide you with more information (please read https://websec.melbpc.org.au/committee/ regularly for committee reports). We also welcome all feedback - contact me at president@melbpc.org.au or at the office on (03) 9567 8000.

Reprinted from the November 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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