From: Judy Taylour [jtaylourapcug@socal.rr.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 2:24 PM
To: Judy Taylour
Subject: APCUG - January 07 NOOZ - Region 9
Happy New Year.....
This edition of NOOZ is sent to
the President, Vice President, Director, Secretary, Treasurer, APCUG
Representative, Newsletter Editor, Webmaster, Membership and Program Chairs of
each APCUG-member User Group.
We urge you to share the
information in NOOZ by including it in your newsletter, posting it on your Web
site, or e-mailing it to members of your group.
In this edition of NOOZ:
1. Welcome to new 2007 Officers
2. Post Annual Conference Information
3. Discount Survey (Thanks to all of you who responded)
4. Volunteer E-mail Coordinator (submitted by Cheryl Wester)
5. O’Reilly User Group Program (submitted by Gabe Goldberg)
1. Welcome to the officers elected for new terms beginning January 2007:
Board of Directors
Bill James
Linda Moore
Ash Nallawalla
Board of Advisors
Jerry Gillette
Barbara Manning
Judy Taylour
Roger Tesch
Cheryl Wester
Unfortunately, Jerry Gillette has resigned from the Board of Advisors due to new work assignments, and Dave Gerber and John Hirsh have resigned due to ill health. We are currently in the process of looking for people who are interested in becoming Advisors for Regions 5, 6 and 12.
Here’s the make-up of the Board of Advisors as of this date:
Region 1 - Jay Ferron
Region 2 - Gabe Golderg
Region 3 - Bob Kwater
Region 4 - Rod Rakes
Region 5 – Open (
Region 6 – Open (KY, IL, IN, and MI)
Region 7 - Roger Tesch
Region 8 - David Steward
Region 9 - Melvin Weekley
Region 10 - Cheryl Wester
Region 11 - Judy Taylour
Region 12 – Open (AK, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, WA and WY)
Region 13 (International, combining
What are the
Advisor’s responsibilities?
Send out NOOZ once a month (boilerplate information sent by Chair)
Reply to e-mail requests from regional groups in a timely manner
Assist groups in updating their information in APCUG’s database
Attend monthly online Advisor meeting on the 3rd
Sunday of the month at
Submit a monthly activity report prior to the meeting
Compile an article for Reports (quarterly) on their region – from newsletters, websites, etc.
Visit groups in the region, if possible ($500 travel budget / $250 for office (phone, etc.) expenses)
If you are interested in becoming the Advisor for Region 5, 6 or 12, please let me know and I’ll give you a call so we can talk about the position.
2. Post Annual Conference Information. We’ll be ending out an extra NOOZ this month noting the winners of the Digital Photo Contest as well as the early registration contest. Some of the Roundtable speakers will have their presentation uploaded to www.apcug.net and groups are encouraged to take a look at them to see if they would like to use them as a presentation for their group. You should probably check the website mid-January for these documents.
3. Discount Survey. Your group’s President and APCUG Representative recently received an e-mail from your Advisor regarding how the product discount information received from APCUG is disseminated to your members. It’s a win-win situation for both the vendor and your members. The vendors see an ROI for sponsoring user group activities (presentations, door prizes, review copies, etc.) and members have the opportunity to buy product at a discount. If you have not replied, please do so with the following information:
Action item: Please send me a brief description of how
your group distributes vendor discounts to members. Include any comments or
issues related to discounts -- do your members like them, use them, appreciate
them as a membership benefit? Do you post them on members-only Web areas? Etc.
If your group hasn't been forwarding discounts -- please consider this a gentle nudge to start doing so
4. Volunteer E-mail Coordinator. At our December Board of Advisors meeting when we discussed asking member groups how they distribute the discount e-mails and Cheryl Wester let us know about her group's volunteer e-mail coordination.
Here is a really great and easy way to get someone new involved in your group. All of us have a lot of mail and information that we want to broadcast to our members. Our members are afraid they are getting spam if they receive mail from names and people they don’t recognize. Do we have a solution for you!! It is a win-win solution—someone volunteers and all get the information you want sent out. Have a Broadcast Person or an e-mail liaison. They are in charge of sending meeting reminders, information on all the great discounts your group gets, and up-to-date information on SIGs. All they need to do is set up a distribution list with email addresses and with one click of a button people get information in a timely manner.
We do this in
Go ahead and ask for a volunteer--you will be surprised at how easy this is and how great it is to have one person in charge of nothing but broadcasting all of your important news.
5. O’Reilly User Group Program. Many user groups and user group members know about O'Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/, a leading publisher of great technical (and other!) books. But not all user groups and members know how strongly O'Reilly supports user groups. They're a tremendous resource for providing books to review in newsletters and on Web sites, as well as for use as raffle and door prizes. They offer user group members
significant discounts on books and regularly distribute a newsletter with diverse valuable information.
But they need to know about your group -- this means current contact information! -- in order to be nice to you. Here's info from O'Reilly on how to get started or updated:
Free books for Your User Group--
O'Reilly would like to send you some free books to share with your members. You can use them for your group library, raffle them off at a meeting, or review them. How you use them is entirely up to you.
Besides books, they can offer your members the following:
-Discount on books, PDFs, and O'Reilly conferences
-Donations of books and other promo items
-Authors as potential speakers
-Announcements of their latest products and news
For more information, to register, or to update your group info, go to:
Happy computing,
Judy Taylour, Chair
Board of Advisors
Your group is a member of APCUG; you have received this e-mail to inform you of updates, changes, or special news and information. Our policy is to send e-mail messages only to announce such information, and we will continue to honor this policy. If you no longer want to receive these e-mails, please reply to the sender. Thank you for being a member of APCUG.