Join in from your own home for free – sign in, sit back, enjoy…
It is now just one week to the day until the Midlands User Group (MUG) holds their inaugural virtual show – a resurrection of sorts of their old physical shows, but held online. This means that the most obvious barrier to getting there – transportation – is eliminated, and you can enjoy the company of RISC OS developers and enthusiasts from wherever it is convenient for you to do so.
The Midlands Virtual Midsummer Show will take place on Saturday, 2nd July, with the ‘doors’ open to the public from 10:45am until 4:00pm. The free event will take place over the Zoom video conferencing software, so all you need in order to join is a computer or other device capable of running the software, an internet connection, and the necessary credentials to sign in. If you have all of that, you can…
Those credentials will be available from the show website on the day, and will be the same as those used for recent MUG meetings – so if you’ve joined one of those, you should already have them. You can also contact the group by 5:00pm on Friday, 1st July at the latest if you’d like to have them dropped into your inbox.
The event will be set up with a number of separate virtual rooms, which the various exhibitors will be using in different ways, so you can expect to see rolling presentations, how-to guides, and videos. Some exhibitors will also be offering live presentations in their rooms, which will be scheduled over the course of the day.
As a visitor, you can wander around those rooms just as you would wander from exhibitor to exhibitor at an in-person show, stop by one to listen to their presentation and perhaps ask a question or two – and if you want a break from the main show, and a general chat with fellow RISC OS users, pop into the virtual kitchen; a room set aside for just that purpose.
There is a list of exhibitors confirmed so far on the show website, with details of whether they’ll be showing a rolling presentation of some kind, and whether they’re planning a live event – with some information where available of their planned subject matter. These exhibitors currently include many of the usual names you’ll find at physical shows, such as R-Comp, RISC OS Developments, RISC OS Open, CJE Micro’s, AMCOG Games, Soft Rock Software, and so on. In addition, RISC OS Cloverleaf will also be exhibiting – something that is ordinarily impractical, as Stefan Fröhling lives in Asia.
Another exhibitor to watch out for is Wi-Fi Sheep. Tom Williamson is unable to attend in person, because he’ll be at an unrelated (in-person) event in Manchester, but he has agreed to provide some content to play throughout the day in the Wi-Fi Sheep room, including the next (and final) episode of the RISC OS Direct video series.
So once again, sign in, sit back, enjoy!
