From all the outstanding feedback I got about our August general meeting, I missed a great presentation from Bob Gostischa on protecting Yourself, Your Computer, and Your Identity. The beginning of August must be a popular time for vacations since a lot of you and I missed this presentation. I have read Sean Henderson’s excellent review of the presentation and encourage those who missed it to do the same.
First Place Newsletter award
Our newsletter has once again won First Place in the APCUG Newsletter competition. Both Richard Teasdale and Allan Ostergren deserve recognition as co-editors for this achievement. When you consider that there are 190 active international user groups within APCUG, this is a major accomplishment and something to be very proud of! Thank you for contributing your talents and outstanding effort every month to make DACS.doc the best newsletter.
I can’t overstate how valuable a resource APCUG is for DACS. Every one of our members is encouraged to logon to their website at www.APCUG2.org to see for yourself. I just finished participating in their Summer Virtual Technology Conference on the 16th. There were many excellent topics and I noticed that some of you also attended. The slideshow presentations are already on their website and by the time you read this, the full presentations will be on their YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/apcugvideos.
I was particularly interested in the last presentation of the day on the Demise of HAL-PC (see last month’s column). It is reassuring that we are doing a lot of the right things at DACS and positioning ourselves to do even more. I was quite proud of the fact that we were mentioned twice in the presentation as an example of a group doing things right with our www.dacs.org website at the top of the list of user group Resources.
I am impressed at how many of you step right up and do what ever needs to be done; Lisa Leifels for standing in for me at both the General and the Board meetings last month, Sean Henderson for stepping in at the last minute to coordinate with the speaker and for writing this month’s review of his presentation, Cathy Quaranta, one of our newest members, for helping Bob out at the membership table, and many others who work behind the scenes to make this 100% volunteer organization work every month. Let’s spread the joy even further with some of you looking into the following opportunities.
Open Opportunities – Urgently Needed
- DACS meeting ambassador and Greeter. Bob Green has been the smiling face behind the desk, faithfully keeping attendance and registering guests at our general meetings. He has been doing this for quite some time. He needs a break from it and would like someone to step up to handle this. Last month Cathy Quaranta helped Bob out and learned the process. As she suggested several members should step up to greet attendees on a rotating basis. Please email me at Opportunities@dacs.org to let Bob know you would be happy to help out. Thanks.
- We need one or more individuals to work with our technical team to integrate the membership data housed in CiviCRM with our new web site using WordPress. This can be a great addition to your resume. The ideal person will be familiar with CiviCRM and WordPress or Drupal (our current CMS). Nice to have some exposure to MySQL, Linux web servers, Apache, PHP, and Bourne shell scripting. What’s most important is your desire to learn what you don’t know. If you or someone you know wants to learn more about this very important opportunity, please get in touch with me at Opportunities@dacs.org and attach your resume.
- If you are already using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Meetup, or LinkedIn, and have suggestions for how we can use social media to create better word of mouth marketing for DACS events, please contact me at PR@dacs.org . We need to seize this opportunity to entice more potential members to experience DACS.
- Do you want to start a Special Interest Group (SIG)? Would you be interested in learning more about a topic but don’t see a SIG for it? We could be utilizing our Resource Center much more and there are many available time slots available. Please send a message to NewSIG@dacs.org .
From mobile to desktop, we inform, enlighten, and educate.
– Dick Gingras, President