The Palm Beach Macintosh User Group

PBMUG Prez Brian Bahe has asked me to write about the decline of computer user groups and the PBMUG in particular.

As I wrote in a previous blog, relating the history of the PBMUG as I knew it, we have been suffering from continually decreasing membership rolls. I think there are a number of reasons for this.

First, today's youth are much too busy to take a few hours of their time to go to a formal meeting somewhere, and certainly don't want the hassle of Robert's Rules of Order and all that. Also, the chief things that made user groups successful in the 1980s and 1990s was the lack of a centralized repository of easily accessible information about their computer and computer-related issues. This slowly began to change with the advent of online services like CompuServe, GEnie, AOL, and others, connected via painfully slow dial-up modems. Here was the first place, other than computer magazines, that users could get together and find solutions by themselves or with help from the online community without ever having to leave home.

By the time of the Millennium, it became very clear that the internet was here and was here to stay. With the adoption of the protocols that became the World Wide Web, search engines like Yahoo and Google and an easy to use browser (the original Mosaic, which morphed into Netscape, which in turn morphed into Firefox), the user communities became global user communities. Freeware and shareware software was obtainable at the click of a mouse. Updated device drivers and operating system patches were similarly available with great ease. Who the heck needed to go to meetings to get a couple of floppy disks or a CD?

I was involved in several user groups in the area, and it became quite clear to me that by the early 2000s, user group membership was declining as quickly as it was graying. The younger members (and I mean people in their 40s and 50s) began staying home in droves, or found other evening activities that didn't make room for a computer user group. People were too busy. Most households were two-income, and so most were either tied up with work or the lives of their children (soccer, band, you name it...).

In a vicious cycle, as membership dwindled, computer and computer software manufacturers were less willing to send representatives to show off the latest release of their products, and so the meetings became less and less relevant to the membership, and because of that, fewer and fewer presenters came to the meetings, and so on...

Let's face it, people want to be entertained, and don't necessarily want to be the entertainers. If there's no "entertainment" at a meeting, why go at all? Not only do most members not want to be entertainers, they don't want to be leaders, either. So as the membership numbers nosedive, so does the pool of potential user group leaders.

The PBMUG's 25+ year history has been marked with more than its share of strife, with questionable elections, presidential recalls, schisms, abuse of power (including at least one distasteful incident where paid-up members were denied entry to meetings by off-duty policemen who were being directed by PBMUG "leadership"), clashing cliques of power seekers, and more, but we always seemed to have enough people who were willing to help, either in an elected role, or at least as advisors and helpers. We're in a situation now, however, where we have completely run out of people willing to accept leadership positions within the PBMUG. President Brian Bahe has served the maximum number of terms permitted by the club constitution, and two of the remaining officers have declined to serve any longer.

Friends, it's poop or get off the pot time. If we cannot find enough individuals willing to hold office and attempt to restore the PBMUG to at least some semblance of what it once was, frankly, it's doomed. What few sheckels are left in the treasury could be used to maintain the club website for a few more years while the club itself lies dormant (perhaps waiting to be reborn?), or we could go out in a blaze of glory with some kind of goodbye party (is there anyone who wants to organize that one? I didn't think so...).

So, you need to ask yourselves, are we relevant? Do we deserve to survive? What is our mission and have we somehow strayed from it? As 2008 winds down, your PBMUG leadership needs to hear from you so they can decide what the next step (if there is one) is.

--Larry Grinnell