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| Jan Barkan, Guiseppe DiFranco, Doug Ross, Charlie Carlon, Rose Lynn, Jim Bolinger, Esver Camacho, and Dave Game ready to board the MacBus! |
Eight members of Gold Coast Mac helped make a success of the Florida Association of Computer User Groups (FACUG) Fall Leadership Conference, arriving on the Mac Bus in Port St. Lucie to lead roundtables and make sure Mac Users were represented.
The GCMac Crew also came away with new ideas for enhancing our community projects.
Through the generosity of Richard Lynn, who allowed GCMac the use of his luxurious private bus, and the driving skills of Vice President Jim Bolinger, the GCMac Team traveled to the leadership conference in style, complete with Mac banners on the bus to help advertise the arrival of a Mac user group at a conference dominated by PC users.
If the confererence participants failed to notice the arrival of the MacBus, or by our entry into the hall wearing color-coordinated GCMac shirts in Graphite, they knew the Mac team had arrived by the leadership role our group took.
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| Dave Game leads the Website Roundtable |
GCMac members led three seperate roundtable sessions, which were a key part of the day long conference. Rose Lynn, Guiseppe DiFranco, and Doug Ross led a seminar on how to work with developers and get them interested in your user group. President Charlie Carlon and Vice President Dave Game led a discussion of newsletter issues and techniques, using Tropical Mac as an example, and Dave led an afternoon session on web page development and design which drew an overflow crowd. Gold Coast Mac was the only group to being its own computer and projection system to enhanced the roundtables led by its volunteers.
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| Rose Lynn participates in a Community Service panel |
In all, Gold Coast Mac members led more than 30 percent of the day's activities, the most involvement in the day's activities by any single user group. That involvement led to special recognation at he final general session of the day, by FACUG President Larry Tyler. Tyler praised Gold Coast Mac, and our representative, Past President Rose Lynn, for the group's hard work in helping to being Macintosh users into the group, which until recently, had been almost exclusively PC in orientation. FACUG is attempting to broaden it's membership base to include users from all computer platforms, and GCMac's strong partipation in the leadership conference was a major milestone in that effort. GCMac has worked to promote the benefits of regional user groups in helping groups deal with cross platform and platform neutral problems and issues..
GCMac presenters have already been invited back to take part in the larger 2001 Spring conference, to be held next March in Orlando.
The Fall Leadership Conference is held to help User Groups deal with common issues and help solve common problems, and drew more than 50 representatives from 14 user groups from around the state. In addition to Gold Coast Mac, Apple users were represented by the Palm Beach Macintosh Users Group, whose Past President also led a discussion on user groups use of the Internet.
Gold Coast Mac was there to learn as well, and those members not leading discussions took part in roundtables in areas ranging from getting publicity for your group to enhancing your community service projects. GCMac agreed to take part in a contest to help redesign the organization's logo, and will enter the group's competition for thw Jerry Award, its anual community service award.
GCMac also too advantage of the trip to assist the community service project of another user group. Loaded on the MacBus were nearly a dozen older Macintosh computers and monitors which our members donated to Mugoo (the Macintosh User Group of Orlando), which has a project to refurbish and redistribute old Macs. Mugoo members made a special trip to Port St. Lucie to pick up the donations, their first from another Mac user group.
Thanks to the GCMac members who gave up their Saturday for the trip, and time in advance to planning seminars and logistics. Special Thanks for Richard Lynn, who graciously allowed us the use of his fully stocked land yacht, and to Esver Camacho, who supplied pastelitos for the trip.
Fall 2000
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