I want to thank Anand Tirumani for presenting his Cloud Computing keynote last month. I know I learned more about cloud computing in general and especially Amazon’s S3 services. Thank you Anand.
June has been a very busy month for DACS. The Mad Hackers Fair was a great success for us. We signed up more than 35 potential members who also completed our new survey. They have been sent invitations to join our group and invited to attend our July general meeting. I am looking forward to welcoming many of these people as new DACS members. My thanks to Lisa Leifels for organizing the committee and to Andy Woodruff, who provided much of the hardware and was instrumental in creating most of the eye catching graphics that drew people to our booth.
We packed our Resource Center for the Windows XP to Ubuntu workshop. A lot of planning and preparation went into this very informative session and it went over extremely well. Kudos to Bruce Preston for putting on a very comprehensive and interactive presentation with assistance from David Mawdsley, Jim Ritterbusch, Sean Henderson, and Charlie Bovaird
I created a survey that was first used at the Mad Hackers Fair. It was designed to get a feel for the topics potential DACS members are interested in hearing about. It contains a list of 25 categories that can be checked off with room to add new categories and asks about the types of computers, tablets, and smart phones used both personally and at work. This survey went over so well that I decided to ask all our members to complete it at SIG meetings, workshops, and our general meeting. I see this as a way to strengthen DACS by better knowing your interests. This will help to identify possible new Special Interest Groups that will appeal to you and influence future general meeting topics. I plan to publish the aggregated results of this survey on our web site in the near future.
I always thought our DACS.org website looked great and it has been getting national recognition for its design. Fortunately for DACS, we have perfectionists responsible for maintaining our website and they saw room for improvement. The Web Design team, led by Annette van Ommeren with Richard Corzo and Jim Scheef, has been vigorously redesigning our website using WordPress to kick it up several notches. I am impressed with their attention to detail, the overall quality of their work, and the rapid progress they have been making. They are way ahead of schedule for phase 1 and it should be up and running by the time you read this. Phase 2 will contain a members only section and will be made available later this year. I am sure you will be impressed with the new look and structure of DACS.org. Check it out.
It is volunteers like these who keep our group alive and interesting. I am hoping to transform more passive participants into DACS contributors. We need your help (I like to refer to these as opportunities) in the following areas:
- Participation on various committees such as Membership, Programs, Public Relations, Newsletter, Advertising.
- Newsletter contributions:
- General Meeting reviews
- Review of SIG meetings
- “How-Tos”
- Software/hardware reviews
- Great “Apps” you have discovered
- Tech reviews, experiences, or opinions … anything technology related you’d like to share with others!
Here is what you get in return:
- Something to add to your resume
- Satisfaction knowing you did something important for the success of DACS
- Social interaction with DACS members working towards a common goal
- Recognition by other DACS members as someone who is making a difference
- Knowing that you will receive the same compensation as the highest paid DACS officer.
- Giving is the secret elixir that gives life meaning
Please contact me by phone or email (dacsprez at dacs dot org) if you can help in any way. No need to make a commitment now; just let me know you may be available to help out. Thanks.
Current Opportunities:
We urgently need one or more individuals to work with our technical team to integrate the membership data housed in CiviCRM with our new web site. This can be a great addition to your resume. The ideal candidate will be familiar with Drupal or WordPress CMS. Nice to have some exposure to CiviCRM, 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 know more about this very important opportunity, please get in touch with me at dacsprez at dacs dot org. If you can, please attach your resume.
DACS meeting ambassador and Greeter. Bob Green has been the smiling face behind the table faithfully keeping attendance and registering guests at our general meetings for quite some time. He needs a break from it and would like someone else to step up to handle this. Please let me or Bob know you would be happy to do this. This job comes with perks. Thanks.
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 publicize DACS events, please contact me. We need to seize this opportunity to create more public awareness and entice more potential members to experience everything DACS has to offer.