Hey Maria, Sarah,

(mailed out Thu, Aug 22nd, 2002, ~3:30pm)

Just a quick note to offer a preface to the enclosed handouts: one from the recent L.A. area MUG Leaders Forum, and one each from QMUG/LA’s August 12th and July 8th meetings. 

The L.A. area MUG Leaders Forum was an incredibly rare opportunity for almost 40 leaders from around 20 officially Apple-registered and recognized Macintosh user groups to come together, meet each other, learn about each other’s successes and challenges, become aware of the many resources available to us, and most importantly to meet Garr Reynolds, the Apple User Group Program manager, and have him address issues important to us. 

The Forum’s handout was a practical, tangible guide containing such pages as enhanced online locator Results w/ current information for us which may not yet be reflected online (including a couple of groups who are active but not yet registered), a summary Perspective page which offered an overview of what we mean as a group in the bigger picture, a Map of our meeting locations (a big picture itself), and a Calendar of our meeting days and times. 

In short, the L.A. area is 1/3 of all officially Apple-registered and recognized Macintosh user groups in California, and is more groups than any other state in the union.  Over 6,000 people are members of these groups, and over 1,500 attend a Macintosh user group meeting each month.  These groups help raise $3,500 in scholarships for students, help get $10,000 in grants for teachers, help teachers w/ their Mac skills and w/ their Mac labs, and more. 

The rest of the handout is pretty self-explanatory.  New to this handout are a gallery of thumbnails of L.A. area MUG website main pages, and Feedback results.  The blank Feedback form itself was a loose card double-sticky taped on top of the Resources page, so you had to remove the Feedback card to see the Resources page.  For this printing, since we now know the results, I left the blank form attached and just printed the results on its backside. 

QMUG/LA’s August 12th handout includes our Star Search 2002 results where we asked our meeting attendees what topics were of most interest to them, our Macworld Expo/NY 2002 Keynote review (thank you again Sarah for letting me watch this at your Market Center at 6:30 in the morning), our Current Macs document which has already been updated for Apple’s new Power Macs, and our current Qalendar of topics thru June 2003. 

QMUG/LA’s July 12th handout includes our sticky stars for voting in our Star Search, our Possible Topics up for vote, name tags for volunteering to present, an overview of topics from our past eight years, advantages and disadvantages of available meeting places, descriptions of available officer positions, and our gallery of thumbnails of our Members’ Macs which link to bigger pictures w/ descriptions of what all is in the picture. 

I hope you find these handouts informative, and helpful in understanding what user groups are around you and how we might be of help to you.  If there is anything — increasing OS X adoption, switching PC users, staffing the holiday season, etc. — please don’t hesitate to let us know.  And hopefully the next time we have an L.A. area MUG Leaders Forum, you or someone else from the Apple Store or Market Center might be able to attend. 

 
Sincerely,