User Groups Expand To Provide Support

Written by John Coonen

Wednesday, 01 April 2009 18:00

Back in the 90's, I was part of a few various "user groups." I'd attend when I could, to learn more on the technical end about software like Oracle, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia (remember them?), etc. Then, I'd also attend specific one-hour quick-hitters over the lunch hour to keep up to date as well.

No offense to the folks who organized those sessions, but can you say "orring-bay?" Not only were the sessions dominated by the techno-savvy, but even worse, the sales engineers were on-hand to create so much jargon-heavy content that the people attending the sessions were not only uninformed, many (including yours truly) were left fully dependent on others to make progress of any kind.

I didn't attend too many sessions, as I left most meetings feeling like a toddler, swimming in the deep-end. Oh, how I hate consultantspeak.

That's why I'm so pleased to see that the user groups of today have evolved. The mantra is to EMPOWER the user, not make him or her dependent upon the sales engineers and technoids who seemed to crave the keys to the kingdom. The open source software movement has led to an open source mindshare approach as well.

While you'll still find the occasional power-grabber from time to time, they're dwindling in number. There are great CMS User Groups going in Milwaukee, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, New York - practically every major city and suburban area. You'll find them cropping up in rural areas too!

The advent of open source website platforms such as Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco, WordPress, Plone, Typo3 and more have ushered in much-needed change when it comes to truly interdependent community-minded thinking. Embracing an attitude of empowering others to succeed has had phenomenal results for business, non-profits and volunteer organizations.