The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group CPU (Club President's Update) Charles Wright charles@melbpc.org.au

A few weeks ago, before I decided to accept the committee's invitation to return as president, I conducted what might be described as a process of due diligence.

Although much of what we are doing today is simply a continuation of the policies we adopted when I was last in the chair, I wanted to know what the club's assets and liabilities were, before accepting any responsibility for them.

I would have been surprised if anything was amiss in our finances, because of the obvious signs of vitality in the club, to say nothing of the respect of Colin Lovitt and the committee, and in particular our treasurer, Bruce Elliott, for the budgeting process. But not all of what I was looking for was contained in the financial statements.

In terms of our finances, however, the first thing I can report to you is that the group is making a profit. In fact, despite continuing, quite substantial investments in facilities like the Internet and the BBS, we're doing well. Our policy of investing the club's resources in facilities for members, rather than leaving them in a bank account, which some of our early executives favoured, has been proved to be a wise one.

People know that membership of this club represents exceptional value for money, and that's led to the strong growth we need to ensure our future. By the time of last month's committee meeting, we'd reached a record 8200 members. That in itself is a good sign. We can, of course, do better there, and I interrupt this report for a brief word from our sponsor:

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Another good sign is the fact that so many of our members are now communicating electronically, either on the BBS or the Internet. As a result, they are in direct contact with the committee, and they know much more about club affairs. I doubt that there's any other public body which has anywhere near our level of communication with members. We're quite a model for open government.

It's worth remembering that only 20 months ago, when the committee started to plough resources into the BBS, and Barry McMenomy took responsibility for its development, we had only 1700 members registered, and most of them were infrequent users. As I write this, we have 5000 registered users, 4000 of them log on regularly, and as a result, our BBS is almost certainly the busiest in the State. Our target is to be the busiest in Australia. The message areas are no longer exclusively devoted to computer topics. You'll find a rich slice of life online, with stimulating discussions on matters of great import, like football. The 16 lines, which used to be embarrassingly under-utilised, have become 23.

I have no doubt that the initiative we took around the same time, to give members access to the Internet, will eventually overtake the BBS. Nobody who has not experienced the full catastrophe of communications in the Unix environment, and the byzantine nature of Internet politics, can fully appreciate the level of devotion Ash Nallawalla has displayed in setting up, then rehousing the system.

I don't know if members even fully understand the extraordinary value that our Internet service represents. If you've never been presented with an Internet bill from a commercial operator, it's easy to underestimate the value of a service which gives you 90 minutes online each day, with no traffic charges, for just $90 a year, plus your annual membership fees. I've signed my wife up, and showed her some of the things that women are doing online - the the Web site for Geek Girls for instance - and some of the developments that will help her in her profession. (It makes it so much easier to indulge one's technological passion, if one can also infect one's spouse.)

My view has always been that these electronic services are vital not just to the future of this group, but also to the future of the nation. Everything we do in this area helps build the potential for Australia to take a niche in something on which the new global economic structure will be based. As president, I'll be doing all I can to influence further expansion into these areas, and to ensure that we offer economical, high-quality training in Internet activities.

I would be misleading you, if I suggested that there are no problems ahead of us. We do face some financial challenges, for instance. Probably the biggest of them is a falling off in advertising revenue for PC Update, and I'm pleased that the committee is taking immediate steps to address that.

I'd be happier, however, if that were the biggest problem facing us. My major concern lies in the area of human assets. We simply don't have enough of them.

This club, like all those other user groups around the world, was built on the tradition of users helping users. It's worked because it's fun and unbelievably informative for the individuals who are actively involved. The contacts you make, the hands-on knowledge you can gain, are a tremendous reward for the time you put in. So many of us have either built new careers, or greatly enhanced our existing ones, by the contacts we've made, and the know-how we've gained from rubbing shoulders with the unbelievably diverse membership of this club.

A lot of people think we're a group full of hackers. We aren't. This club is full of managing directors and maintenance men, salespeople and single mothers, stockbrokers and security officers, teachers and technologists, physicists and physical educationists, doctors and draughtsmen, lawyers and labourers, accountants and acupuncturists... I'm sure we've got at least one acupuncturist in there somewhere.

The people who are content to have their membership fees subsidised by those volunteers who provide all the benefits and do all the work don't realise what they're missing. Yes, the subsidy is valuable. Without our volunteer workforce, my calculations suggest we should all be paying at least $100 a year just to maintain the existing services. Some of the existing benefits we simply wouldn't have. But that's only the most obvious return. You don't discover the real benefits of membership of this group until you get involved.

Somehow, over the past few years, we've stopped communicating this fact to the membership at large. Perhaps it's become one of those obvious truths that everybody takes for granted. To some extent, I think we've simply stopped emphasising the fun and the human networking, because we've been so absorbed in building up the group's technology. One of my goals for this year is to get at least a quarter of the group actively engaged.

If you've got any ideas in this area, if you'd like to volunteer, if you want to start using what this group really has to offer, and at the same time help to expand our services, send me a message on the BBS or the Internet.

I promise to get you involved.

Reprinted from the May 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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