Midlands User Group meeting – 11th June

A week later than ordinarily scheduled to avoid a clash with the Jubilee weekend and other plans people may have had, the next meeting of the Midlands User Group (MUG) will take place on Saturday, 11th June, starting at the usual time of 2:00pm.

Rather than a formal talk, this being the last regular meeting before the MUG Virtual Midsummer Show its purpose will be to discuss and finalise plans for the event, which will take place in early July.

Saturday’s meeting will take place using the Zoom video conferencing system, allowing anyone to join in – and it may be particularly useful to anyone who has an interest in the show, not just those organising it; see below.

Log-in details for the meeting are the same as other recent MUG virtual meetings, so if you’ve joined any of those you should have the necessary details. If not, simply contact MUG in plenty of time to receive them.

RISC OS Midlands Show banner

The show will take place on Saturday, 2nd July, running from 11:00am until 4:00pm, and will also be held online using the Zoom system, and it will be completely free to attend. That means there is almost no real barrier for anyone to attend.

All behind a single event and log-in, it will be broken up into a number of separate virtual rooms – each room, in effect, being an online incarnation of an exhibitor’s stand at a physical show. In other words, each exhibitor will have a room allocated to them. They can leave a general, standalone presentation running in their room for most of the day, with a live appearance scheduled to offer a more formal talk, or even provide a simple Q&A session.

If you are exhibiting, therefore, and haven’t yet made use of this Zoom facility it may be worth attending Saturday’s meeting to get an overview of how it works, and what you’ll need to do if you also wish to wander around the show to visit other exhibitors. If you are planning to join the Midsummer event as a visitor, but haven’t used the virtual rooms facility, you may benefit from a trial run of moving from room to room.

There are currently at least ten virtual rooms planned, hosting a range of RISC OS luminaries, including RISC OS Open, RISC OS Developments and R-Comp, CJE Micro’s, and RISCOSbits, and more – and, although Wi-Fi sheep aren’t themselves attending, the final episode of the RISC OS Direct video series has been completed, and the plan is for it to be premiered to the public at the show (Wi-Fi sheep’s backers on Patreon can see it now). A full list of exhibitors, and the corresponding schedule, will be published closer to the event.

There will also be a ‘virtual kitchen’, a separate room with no specific RISC OS exhibitors or presentations, where you can simply get away from the main event to have a friendly natter with other users – but do note that virtual tea and cake is not available (and would probably be quite bland if it was); you’ll need to pop to your own kitchen to supply your own snacks.

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