TCS - What Do You Want?

What Do You Want?

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the August 1997 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Attendance has been a bit light at many TCS meetings, and we want to try to determine what we can do to improve it. Especially at the General Meetings, where we usually try to have vendors attend, it is difficult to persuade some vendors to attend that we would like to bring in, unless we can guarantee them audiences that are significantly larger than those we have been seeing recently. We are doing a couple of special programs during the summer, when attendance frequently drops off because people have so many other demands on their time, but I want to take this opportunity to ask the membership exactly what they would like to see, both at TCS General Meetings, and at our Sig Meetings.

A lot of very good information is generated at Sig meetings, but there are frequently few people there to see it. I have begun to ask different people to take notes on the questions that were posed from the audience during some of these meetings (it is difficult for me to remember them all when I get home), and I am attempting to reanswer those questions in I/O Port Articles.

I do this for a couple of reasons. One is it sometimes gets old answering the same question over and over, because the audience is different, and people may not have been there when the question was posed before. If I can answer the question in the I/O Port, hopefully everyone can read the answer, and then perhaps in future meetings we can explore some new questions that have not been asked and answered many times before. The second reason is we hope people will realize that the folks that got their questions answered were present at the meeting when those questions were asked; if they had just been at that meeting, they could have gotten answers to their questions as well. Perhaps this will have a positive effect on meeting turnout.

We have a number of meetings in the Tulsa Computer Society, and regardless of how experienced you are, there are several meetings each month that are targeted directly at you. Two Getting Started meetings a month are focused on the very beginner. Anyone is welcome to attend, but they should realize that a significant effort will be made to cater to the people who just got their computer. We have a number of meetings, such as Windows, that are targeted at the intermediate computer user. Beginners are certainly welcome, as are their questions, but they should realize that some of the things may be a bit over their head; they can still learn a lot by coming, but they should not feel discouraged if they do not understand everything. And we have some advanced meetings, such as Access, where even intermediate users may not understand everything that is going on, but as the advanced access users pool their knowledge to come up with the solution to member's problems, someone with an open and inquisitive mind can pick up a lot of good information, even if they might not be able to duplicate the entire solution by themselves. We have three meetings that are involved in programming, including Visual Basic, Access, and OS/2-Java, and four meetings that are involved with Operating Systems: Windows, Windows NT, Linux, and OS/2-Java.



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Tulsa Computer Society 07/07/97
Don Singleton, President
tcs@galstar.com