 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group CPU (Club President's Update) Charles Wright charles@melbpc.org.au |
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What a year that was! The last monthly meeting for 1993 indicated graphically the sort of advantages that the sheer size of the group, and the contacts we've been working to establish within the industry, have brought to members.
Borland, our oldest and most generous supporter in the software industry, distributed $100,000 in current packages - the Quattro Pro, Paradox and WordPerfect suite - which was an extraordinary benefit to those whose tickets were drawn, and a $1200 windfall to the club.
(As always we have to learn from experience. Some members received more than one prize, which was a decision that Borland's chief, Belinda Hanna, had to make on the spot, but one which we'll have to reverse in future, simply because it isn't fair to those who miss out.)
And while Borland was giving its presentation, we took Dennis Rowe the marketing manager for Dell - which made its first presentation to us on the same night - upstairs to indoctrinate him. He'd been impressed by the size and enthusiasm of the meeting, and casually indicated his willingness to support us.
We quickly suggested that in that case he might like to provide us with the Unix box that we'll need for access to the Internet, which is one of this year's big projects. He agreed. That computer has serious grunt, and Dell's donation represents a $10,000 saving for us, and an advance of our Internet timetable, about which more later.
We're extremely grateful to Dell, not just because of the immediate benefit to us, but also because it makes it easier for us to convince other companies to assist us in the future, just as Hewlett-Packard's generosity to us last year has encouraged others. These things snowball.
A week or so earlier we'd persuaded WordPerfect that rather than sell its cast-off 386SX computers, it should donate one of them to us, in return for some access to our BBS
We also managed to convince WordPerfect to direct another two of those computers to the Lighthouse Foundation, which provides real assistance to street kids. That's a major escalation of our Community Outreach program which we've been quietly working on for a while, and under which we provide training for charitable institutions, and foster donations of equipment and software.
It's important for us to assist our community, as well as ourselves, and if you or your company has got a computer you've got no further use for, contact me, Peter Freeman or Janet Henstock at the office. We'll find a good home for it.
What we've been doing, with all this, is leveraging our manifest strengths principally our size, and the sheer quality and circulation of PC Update - to boost all our other activities, and improve our financial position.
The continuing effort by the committee to encourage more volunteer participation paid off, not just in terms of extending resources and saving our funds, but also in ways which I think are far more important.
We were flat out last year establishing our new facilities, providing more resources and putting our administrative and financial systems into place, but we always had another, parallel agenda - to encourage more members to participate in the running of their club, and to make the decision-making process far more democratic.
It's one of the less obvious achievements of the committee, but in my view perhaps the most vital one, that we succeeded in promoting that vision. As a result, I can tell you that as we enter this new year, more members are involved in each area of the group's activities than ever before. Increasingly they are making the decisions about their own areas of interest, and getting the committee's support for them. In other words, we are starting to be driven by the membership, rather than by the executive. Increasingly, that will be the way this group will develop over the next year.
A good indication of the result of this policy is our BBS. We had backed ourselves there, over the years, into a dangerous corner. We had only two sysops, and they were chronically overworked, and perhaps to some extent as a result of that, wary of the changes the committee was determined to produce. Some of the older, more entrenched interests in the group have been more than a little ambiguous about the new regime, and that's perfectly understandable. We cannot claim to be infallible, we must acknowledge that not all of our decisions have been beyond criticism, and the status quo always looks safer. It takes time before any administration can expect to prove its competence, but at the same time, there was an overwhelming demand for immediate change.
So far as the BBS was concerned, we simply weren't satisfied with the prolonged delays that we'd had in getting our 16 lines up and running, nor happy with the fact that in eventually achieving that, we'd had to split the operation into two boards. Effectively we had only a two-line messages BBS, so we had a major lack of resources there, and an over-supply of lines on the files board. To a large extent, those problems resulted from the sheer weight of the workload on the sysops.
We were also concerned that with only two people controlling every aspect of the BBS, we were disturbingly vulnerable to any illness, accident or change of heart. We set about encouraging members who had an interest in communications to get involved directly with the BBS administration, and we announced that we wanted to have more members with sysop status.
I We had several catastrophes. Our former sysops resigned-two valuable, highly competent members whose loss we regretted-one of the host computers died, there were software and hardware problems, and we had a dreadful mess on our hands. But under the old system, we would not have been able to recover from those disasters without considerable delay and inconvenience. With people like Barry McMenomy, Peter Freeman, Colin Lovitt, Phillip Lew, Terry Kemp and many others, some of them not even members of the group, devoting extraordinary amounts of time, and ingenuity we got things going again, and very quickly had a better service than ever.
We had a hard disk crash on the second machine just before the Christmas break, but we were now in a position to regard it not so much as a problem as an opportunity to re-integrate the boards.
We managed to use the new attractiveness of PC Update as an advertising medium to get some cheaper deals on some equipment - a type of persuasion which the publishing world calls a "contra", and at which Gary Taig has become quite adept - which enabled us, at the same time, to upgrade the facilities.
The result is that despite an increase in traffic, the BBS has never been easier to get through to, a gaggle of high-speed modems has made transactions faster, and there's many more echoes and message areas.
By the time this goes to press, we expect to have our multi-disk CD-ROM reader online, so there'll be an enormous increase in files to download. We're well on track to having one of Australia's best, and cheapest, all-round BBS services.
Our Comms SIG has become a vital, highly energised group that is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to win the communications revolution. If you haven't been to one of those SIG meetings yet, now's the time to get along. A lot of members don't realise just what they could be getting out of our SIG meetings.
We invested in a first-class training facility, again using the good will we'd built up in the industry to save several thousand dollars. Tom Coleman has at last got a highly professional training sub-committee supporting him, under the direction of Colin Lovitt, and together they've developed a much more cohesive training program. We can now offer better value in training than any other source, meeting what is the principal objective of our charter: the education of members. Take a look at the calendar in this issue, and enrol yourself, your family, or your workmates.
At the same time, Ash Nallawalla and I - but principally Ash - have been working to establish our Internet feed. It's a tremendous commitment, because of the underlying complexities of Unix and the communications system, but Ash has made good progress, and probably late this month, or early next month, we will have begun a trial involving 200 members. For somewhere between $50 and $75 a year, they will get full Internet access - which is an outstanding bargain. This project will have benefits that will extend far beyond this club. If you want to get on the fast track to the future, become one of the foundation members of our Internet fraternity, because it will be a few months before we can expect to offer general access.
Financially November found us back in the black, having increased our income and regained control over our expenses, despite continuing investment in better, more up-to-date equipment. The office, for instance, having for the first time gained adequate computer resources, has now been linked with a peer-to-peer network.
Under our new treasurer, Bruce Elliott, we are finally achieving a degree of financial control essential for the proper management of our affairs. It includes developing what for this group is a novel concept - budgeting.
There is much more to look forward to in terms of additional income, as we set up to have a monthly presence at swap meets. We need to capitalise on the potential of this market and thanks to the work done by Felix van Lier, Laurence Blake, David Webster and Robert O'Connor, and a growing band of volunteers, we're now very well-placed to push our shareware, while at the same time selling new memberships, magazines, and perhaps cheap computer books into the most active area of the market. We had our first stall last month, but we have a lot more ideas, and we still need more volunteers to man them. It's a great opportunity to meet people, help the group, and help yourselves. If you can let us have a couple of hours of your time, please contact Janet Henstock.
I'm running out of space here, but briefly, in other areas, we've taken a few steps towards developing a professional marketing plan, and we will shortly be able to complete the overall strategic planning process.
The computer industry is a disparate collection of highly opinionated individuals who tend naturally to assume that their choice of computers, operating systems, applications and interests are paramount, and their opinions superior to those of everyone else.
Against that background, it's amazing to see how successful this group has been at maintaining a common purpose.
That's not to say that there aren't diverse and hotly-argued views about practically everything we do.
There are those who say we're too businesslike, others that we're not businesslike enough, some who accuse us of having "caviar tastes", others who say we ought to spend much more on members' facilities. Some say we should be smaller, that our headquarters ought to be in Mount Waverley, where they live (despite the fact that the centre of the membership base is Hawthorn-Camberwell), or that the magazine ought to have more articles for beginners, or alternatively, that it ought to have more articles for experts, and fewer articles for beginners.
The feed-back I get suggests the vast majority of members can see for themselves the enormous achievements that we've made over the past 12 months, are appreciative of the work and commitment involved in that, and have an overwhelming sense of enthusiasm for the future.
I sincerely hope the prospects for your New Year will be as bright as those of your club.
PS: A couple of country SIG members are baying for my blood as a result of my comments in the December magazine about the former Bairnsdale SIG, and my call for SIG leaders to put the interests of the group as a whole before any sectional interest.
I am accused, in what are somewhat extravagant outbursts, of racism, ruralism and sundry other crimes, including having no vision for the club, and have been ordered by these correspondents to apologise. 1 make no apologies for the substance of what I wrote. These matters are vital to the future of this group. I'm not prepared to use these columns as public relations puffs. It is my aim to keep members informed of the issues, no matter how contentious, rather than sweep the dirt under the Persian rug, while directing attention to the pretty pattern.
I won't be dissuaded from that view by people who choose tendentiously to misinterpret my remarks and play the man, rather than the ball. But I would regret it if any members did consider my comments anti-German, or hostile to country people. I was born and raised in the country, I have spent more than half my life living in and supporting rural areas, and I have put considerable effort over several years in this club, into working to improve the lot of country members. My grandfather, as it happens, was German.
Reprinted from the Jan / Feb 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
