H A L - P C The Houston Area League of PC Users People wishing to start users groups frequently write us asking for guidelines and for information on how HAL-PC was organized. MEETING SPACE: HAL-PC was organized in the early spring of 1982 by a few people who got together at a ComputerLand. As the group grew, meetings were moved to a nearby church. Again the group quickly outgrew the space available to us at the church, so meetings were moved to a Sears Business Center (SBC). At the SBC, the group once again grew quickly from about 50 to over a hundred, and the search was on for a place that would hold at least 150. At the time, we wanted to find a place that would let us meet for free. The University of Houston provided lecture halls that fit the bill, but it is not conveniently located, and traffic is a problem. After one meeting at UH, a local blood bank center offered us a beautiful meeting room, free parking, central location, and free refreshments. They never even asked for blood! But they could only hold 150, and after two meetings, we had outgrown that space. With great reluctance we left the blood center and moved back to UH for one meeting while we searched for quarters that would hold at least 250. There are not that many free 250-seat auditoriums around, we found out. Hotel meeting rooms would normally be beyond our budget, but a member found a very nice one that would let us have a 250+ seat room for $100, with more room available for future expansion. We decided that it was worth that much to have a permanent home, and took it. We have had three meetings there and everyone seems to like it. Members no longer have to guess at where the next meeting is going to be. Our membership is now over 300 with about 250 members and guests at the last meeting in September. .pa SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS (SIGS): In December 1982, it appeared that the membership, then at about 100, was too large to meet everybody's needs at one monthly meeting. Members were given a SIG survey form to fill out indicating areas of interest. Those who indicated a willingness to lead a SIG were given a list of people who had shown a high level of interest in that SIG and were left to their own devices to organize their SIG. We had hoped that SIGs would not attract more than about 20 members each. A small group can meet almost any where and would be more conducive, we felt, to more informal and participative meetings. Meeting space, as expected has not been much of a problem. The first SIG meetings were held at KINDERKARE, which has child care centers all over Houston, but no PCs. A local computer center, COMNET, has been generous in allowing the SIGS to meet at their centrally-located store which has PCs to use. The first few meetings of each SIG were awkward because nobody really knew what a SIG is supposed to do. We assured potential SIG leaders that expertise was not required, only the desire to organize. A SIG could always invite an expert to come to a meeting to lecture or answer questions, if desired. The SIGs have become quite successful, thanks to some terrific people who have contributed their time to lead the groups. Our current active SIGs are Accounting/Business, Assembly Language, BASIC, Beginning Users, APL, DBASE II, 1-2-3, Graphics, Games, Hardware, Stock Market, and Telecommunications. We encourage anyone to put their name and phone number in the newsletter if they want to get a SIG going. SIGs under development include Engineering, Petroleum & Geology, "C", Utilities, Fortran, and Medical. The two lessons that we learned about forming SIGs is that people are willing to help organize if you let them and that people should not be concerned about not being an "expert" in the area nor knowing exactly what the SIG is going to do. THE SOFTWARE LIBRARY: Maintaining and distributing the software library has been the most difficult aspect of running HAL-PC. We quickly had about a dozen single-sided disorganized disks. There was a lot of duplication and "junk" (non-working) programs mixed in with some good stuff. As for distribution, people came early to meetings at the Sears Business Center and used the computers there to copy the library. They usually kept copying while the meeting was going on, making it difficult to have a good meeting. That problem was solved when we moved to meeting locations that had no computers to use, but that made it even harder to get copies. By January 1983, we had over 30 single-sided disorganized disks with virtually no means of distribution. We asked for volunteers and started working on sorting out the software, getting rid of duplications and programs that did not work. Although people were willing to help organize the software, coordinating their work was probably harder for the software librarian than if he had simply done all the work himself to start with. It may be best to just have one person do all the work on the library, if anyone has the time. At one meeting, we asked how many still had single-sided drives. About three people out of over a hundred raised their hands, so we switched to doubled-sided disks. Not enough people are using DOS 2.0 to allow going to 9-sector disks. To make it easier for people to find and get copies of software in their main areas of interest, we grouped programs onto disks in the following areas: Accounting/Business, Communications, Demo, Games, Utilities and Word Processing. With the massive amount of excellent public domain software coming out each month, it is a big job trying to keep up with it. We plan on having a "disk of the month" with new stuff on it for people who already have the rest of library, and also integrating the new programs into the library by category, to maintain order over the long run. We had intended to give each SIG leader a copy of the library and use the SIGs for distributing software; however, the SIGs had the same problems with copying disrupting meetings that we had at the main meeting. Also, only about half the members (maybe less) ever go to SIG meetings. We offered to give a set of disks to anyone who would make sets for at least ten other members. It remains to be seen how this will go over. We have also taken to selling sets to members at $3.50 a disk. This allows a small profit to go the person making the copies to compensate for wear and tear on their disk drives. Unfortunately, some Freeware-types have taken a stand against User Groups charging a copying fee for distributing their software (specifically, PC-TALK). We have not tried selling our library to outsiders yet, but we plan to start exchanging with other groups soon. We currently get most of the new software from a member (now living in Georgia) who is constantly downloading programs from bulletin boards. We have a disk file library program (written by a HAL-PC member and available to any group who wants it) that we use to keep track of the library and to automatically compare it to other libraries. LEADERSHIP: Being an officer in a user group is personally rewarding. It is a well known axiom that what you get out of an endevour is relative to what you put into it. On the other hand, it is a lot of work. So we have election of officers every six months, with burn-out time probably being shorter than that. HAL-PC has a President who presides over the monthly main meeting and directors meeting. The Vice President's primary specific responsibility is to find speakers for the monthly meeting. In general, the VP, like the other officers, is always thinking of activities for the group and of ways to promote the group. The other elective offices are Secretary and Treasurer. All elected officers are on the Board of Directors. The newsletter editor probably carries the greatest workload and is not elected, so he has no way to get out from under. Heh, heh! We planned it that way. We also have a Group Purchase person and a Liaison person who are "appointed" (anyone who volunteers) to their positions. The SIG leaders are the people who originally volunteered and no provision has been made to let them escape through elections. We leave the running of each SIG up to the SIG. We do require that all people attending SIGs be members of HAL-PC. The SIG leaders are automatically on the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors meets once a month, 45 minutes before the main meeting, to vote on major issues such as amount of dues, HAL-PC expenditures, etc. The purpose of forming a Board of Directors was to make it easier to taken action on behalf of the group without having to bring everything to a vote of the membership. NEWSLETTER AND MAILING LIST: The newsletter is a vital element of HAL-PC. In our mobile days, it was only way to alert members as to where the next meeting would be. Standard features of the newletter are the agenda for the next meeting, a recap of the last meeting, and the times and places for upcoming SIG meetings, as well as reports on SIG meetings. Another section features selections from the software library each month. The rest of the 15-25 page newsletter consists of articles contributed by members. Advertising space is sold at moderate rates, and the mailing list is sold to appropriate vendors for one-time use. We have a bulk mailing permit. It saves the group money on postage, but takes more time and effort to mail the newsletters. The newsletter is uploaded from the PC of the editor to the mainframe of a company who has donated the computer time and supplies. The mainframe formats the text and prints it out on a laser printer. We normally print about 500 issues, with the extras going to visitors, magazines, other groups, and local computer stores. DUES AND OTHER MONEY MATTERS: HAL-PC charges dues of $25 a year, the bulk of which goes for room rent and newsletter expenses. Although the newsletter printing is donated, the sorting, labeling, stapling, stamping and mailing cost money. At the present time, we are not involved in any money- raising activities. Our rationale is that money raised by selling items to the members is the same money we could get by raising the dues, if needed, so why complicate things. In addition, we have several vendors who regularly come to meetings and sell disks and other supplies at very good prices. We do make group purchases, but the discounts are passed on directly to the purchasers. All memberships expire on May 31 of each year. People who join during the fiscal year pay prorated dues. The advantage is that we do not have to keep track of everyone's expiration date and that we can have one big push per year for membership renewals. On the downside, all the money comes at once, and must be carefully budgeted to last a year. My feeling is that it would be better to let memberships expire and be renewed year-round. One time, about $2500 worth of membership dues were deposited without first recording the names - a big mistake that caused a lot of problems when many of those people (including myself) were dropped from the newsletter mailing list for non- payment of dues. We charge vendors a token amount of $5 to introduces themselves at the start of the meeting and to set up a table to vend from at the end of the meeting. One vendor, Paige Computer Consultants, has been with the group from the start and has done a lot for us. One of his services is to provide a dial-up bulletin board (at 713-933-7353) where members can exchange messages and download software. GETTING SPEAKERS: Getting speakers whose topic will interest most of 300 different people is a problem. For instance, a lecture on BASIC programming would probably appeal to only about half the people to start with, and for many of those people the lecture is likely to be either too simple or too technical. As a result, we leave narrow areas of interest to the SIGs. Our recent speakers have been representatives from Digital Research, from MicroPro, and from Tandy (with the Model 100). At future meetings, we have reps from Microsoft and from Grid Computers scheduled. These speakers are local representatives from these companies, they do not have PR people at headquarters that fly around giving presentations to user groups. We ask the speakers to present a general overview of their products and not get too involved in technical details. When a speaker gets in front of a group of 250 and tries to show on a 13-inch monitor how some program works, he is sure to bomb. After the formal meeting is over, detailed demonstrations are given for those who want to cluster around the monitors. It would be nice to have a giant-screen TV with RGB input, but those cost about $10,000 and nobody has offered to donate one. We usually have about 15 minutes for general questions and answers about the PC hardware and software problems and about 20 minutes for announcements. We tried letting SIG leaders tell about their monthly meetings, but not everyone was interested, and we now confine that to the newsletter. The most important thing about the monthly meeting is to have subjects that are very general and to keep the meeting moving briskly. An hour and a half is a long time to sit still and listen. At our meetings, only the main speaker for the evening gets to talk for more than two minutes at a time, and he is asked to keep his talk to no more than 20 minutes. We start right on time and leave time for informal discussions after the meeting is over. MISCELLANEOUS: There a lot of things the group could do that we are not presently involved in. We tried having a hardcopy library of magazines and books, but the idea died out from not having a place to store the materials. A good alternative is to have a database of subjects of articles published in PC-related magazines. I would like to see PC user groups across the country band together to facilitate exchanging ideas and software - maybe even have an annual meeting somewhere. One example of such cooperation would be to have a survey form that each group would have its members fill out. The compiled results reported from each group could provide some valuable information that could help companies and users communicate. Someone suggested that we devise a "New Member Package" consisting of a disk with some of the best public domain software on it, a catalog of the entire library and this write-up of our history. The same person suggested that we give something like a couple of blank disks to anyone contributing an article to the newsletter. I expect that we will act on both of these suggestions soon. IN CONCLUSION, That's our life story. I would like to hear back from other groups. Have fun!