The Changing Role of User Group Meetings

[SumRunner]

We had a great User Group meeting in Seattle this week. Microvision hosted the "SLUGs" - the Seattle LabVIEW User Group meeting, and attendance far exceeded my expectations. We had 32 attendees- more than ever before. Even better, the event attracted most of our high-quality LabVIEW programmers. It made for some great presentations and discussion.

Jim Zurcher, one of our talented Alliance Members, presented on the State Chart module. I actually learned more from his presentation than from the internal training NI presented to the sales force, so thank you Jim! Brian Tyler, formerly of NI and now at Microsoft, presented an interesting presentation on using .NET with LabVIEW. It wasn't as much about how to program .NET, it was more about the philosophical reasons why to use .NET and LabVIEW together. It was great food for thought.

To be honest, we've really dragged our feet getting the User Group going again. It is very hard to get the location, time, speakers, and attendance all lined up for these events. We don't shy away from hard work, but sometimes wonder if we are providing what you, the users of LabVIEW, want. As attendance drops at User Group meetings, we have to figure out- is this what you really want? This week's event, and the great attendance, tells me that yes, this is what you want.

So let me put this question out there for you- what is the role of the User Group meeting for you? Are you looking for advanced training? Networking with other LabVIEW Users? Learning about new NI products? Free Pizza? Hanging out with the NI sales folks?

Jared is organizing our future meetings, he has a rough outline for the next few months:

June:  VIPM and other tools for deploying your code and managing source code.

July:  Web Services.

August:  (Head to NIWeek!)

Sept:  New Features of the new version of LabVIEW

October:  BBQ Picnic

I look forward to our future meetings. Let me know how we can make the User Group meetings more effective.