The next Midlands User Group (MUG) meeting will take place online, using the Zoom video conferencing system, from 2:00pm on Saturday, 2nd October, with a discussion topic inspired by the cancellation of this year’s London Show and the scarcity of active user groups.
MUG members were unsurprisingly saddened by the news that this year’s London Show – one of the largest events in the RISC OS calendar – has had to be cancelled. With there now only being two large (for RISC OS values of large) shows each year, Wakefield and London, they are the mainstays of the calendar, and offer a good opportunity for users to get together in person, to discuss what they’re up to and what’s happening – and of course to find out what’s happening straight from the horses’ mouths; the various exhibitors.
Combining this with the relative sparseness of user groups, the disparity of size and organisation, and what they therefore mean (and offer) to their members, the Midlands group wants to propose an initiative:
- To discuss how user groups can work together to provide mutual support where needed, and to further enhance the spirit within the RISC OS community and the market that both supports and is supported by the users.
MUG wants to discuss the idea, and ideally with more than just its own members since it is pertinent to the whole community, and so has issued an open invitation to a number of other user groups, and of course anyone with an interest in the platform is also welcome to join in and contribute ideas or opinions – and who knows, possibly even help shape the future of the RISC OS community.
If you have joined any recent online MUG meetings or the online show the group recently hosted, you can join this meeting with the details you already have. If not, get in touch with the group to ask for them.
And speaking of the July show…
The Midlands Virtual Midsummer Show, held in July, was an event that picks up where the group’s physical shows left off when they were shuttered a few years ago; the last independent Midsummer show was in 2014, and for the next couple of years morphed into a group of RISC OS exhibitors at the Recursion Computer Science Fair.
Resurrecting the show as an online one, the group explored a slightly different format for such events, with each exhibitor being allocated a virtual room in which to run rolling demonstrations, with some holding live presentations at certain times. The various talks were recorded and have been uploaded to the group’s new YouTube channel, the RISC OS MUG Zone – so if you were unable to attend on the day, the various talks are available to view there.
In addition, a playlist for the show has been set up that includes not only those videos, but also videos uploaded by exhibitors to their own channels of their own rolling demonstrations, etc.
