oj@apollo.COM (Ellis Oliver Jones) (11/06/88)
At the X Users' Group Meeting last Thursday (Oct 27th) there was,
a lot of discussion about how to make X accessible to people who
don't have Internet or UUCP connections. Word-of-mouth brought
ten people out of fifty or so without net connections to the XUG
meeting. Imagine the attendance if we advertised meetings
somewhere besides on the net!
I took an action item to investigate what it would take to
affiliate XUG with the Boston Computer Society. For those of
you who don't know, the BCS has well over 60,000 members, of
whom about half live in the Boston area. They have regular
and professional mailings, as well as many meetings. Despite
the regional sound of the BCS, it would probably do
a good job of helping get the X word out across the US, if
not internationally.
Anyway, here's what it takes to start a "user group" in the BCS.
(1) commitment to nine meetings or tutorials a year.
(2) a petition signed by fifty BCS members in good standing.
(3) after six months in good standing, the BCS will help with
a newsletter.
To get the fifty signatures, I guess some XUG people
should go to a monthly BCS meeting and explain what we're trying
to do.
To muster nine meetings a year, we're going to have to
get organized :-).
There'll be another XUG meeting in early December somewhere in
the Cambridge/Boston area (probably not at Apollo; many people found
Apollo's suburban location inconvenient). The next one after that
will be at the X Symposium at MIT in January. Probably the
X Symposium meeting is the right forum for deciding about this
affiliation issue. If anyone has another idea, it would be great
if you did your homework and told us about it in January.
/Ollie Jones