Special Report: The State of OS/400 User Groups, Part 2

by Alex Woodie

Kristine Hudnut, president of MUMM, postulates that there were two reasons for this decline: the availability of technical information from seminars and the Web, and the adoption of new technologies in OS/400 shops.

"It used to be that everybody was running AS/400s, green screens, RPG, no Internet, no TCP/IP, all twinax," she said. "Now they're using [Windows] NT and Microsoft Exchange."

Instead of fighting the changes and continuing with the same meeting format and content, this year Hudnut and her colleagues on MUMM's board decided to adapt to the changes. So instead of holding a short meeting every month, MUMM decided to hold only four or five meetings a year, but to make each meeting longer. This allows the speaker at each meeting to provide a greater amount of information and education on particular topics of interest to the members.

"The way it was before, with a one-and-a-half-hour presentation--like a COMMON session--you can't give detailed information. It's usually an overview--'Here's what WebSphere can do,'" Hudnut said. With the new format, "You can really start teaching people how to use that product, and you can give them really useful information."

The new format is starting to pay off. MUMM held its first meeting with the new format this February, when the group brought in John Carr, a respected OS/400 expert and a regular on the OS/400 speaking circuit. Carr's presentation on embedded SQL calls and working with OS/400 IFS attracted 28 people, nearly twice what meetings were drawing before.

MUMM isn't the only group changing its format. In fact, across the midrange, many groups have already changed--or are in the midst of changing--their meeting format, all in the name of providing better education.

Phoenix User Network, for example, commits to holding at least six regular meetings per year. In the last couple of years, PhUN has tried to break out of its normal routine to make things more interesting for its members, said David Stobberingh, the chairman of PhUN. "We try to have one or two special-event meetings a year," he said. "It's a relatively new angle for us. We try to do something outside the parameters of our normal meeting, such as hands-on training sessions."

However, providing quality education isn't a simple thing to arrange, and can be expensive. Many speakers don't charge a fee, but top-drawer OS/400 experts often bill user groups upward of $1,500, plus expenses, for their services for a day. Since user groups tend to be nonprofit organizations with fixed budgets, most of the smaller groups can't pay for speakers, so the largest groups tend to attract the best speakers.

Providing hands-on training on specific iSeries topics is a great thing for user groups to be doing, agrees Pat Martin, director of The Training and Mentoring Company, a company that puts on an annual multi-day iSeries conference, called the Education Connection, every June in southern Florida.

"Half-day seminars--that's the thing they should be doing," Martin said of the user groups. "The problem is that most of them aren't that big, and they don't have the resources to do it themselves. You have to reach a certain threshold to be able to do it."

The larger user groups are big enough, and some of them have actually gone beyond the half-day seminars into multi-day mini-conferences, complete with vendor expos. One of the more successful events is hosted by OCEAN, an OS/400 user group in Orange County, California. With more than 400 active members, OCEAN is among the largest user group in the country besides COMMON, and has actually been growing its membership base, by about 1 to 2 percent a year.

"We started doing two-day seminars five years ago, and now we have them every year," said Lewis Libman, OCEAN president. "The first couple of events were losing situations. But you learn from what you're doing, and after that we were able to make money to pay to bring in speakers."

Libman says OCEAN's conference attracts a different sort of user than typically attends COMMON, and serves a different educational need. "We're finding people don't want to spend the money to go to COMMON," he said. "We can bring the education to them."

Likewise, Chicago's iSeries user group, Omni User, is another large organization that has the wherewithal and the regional demand for in-depth technical training in the conference format. Bill Herman, the group's president, said last year's conference had six tracks and 30 different sessions, and was attended by about 200 people.

"We see ourselves as a mini COMMON, for our annual conference and our monthly meetings," Herman said. "Not everyone can't afford go to COMMON. We offer a lower-priced alternative."

Herman is aware that the role of user groups in the lives of AS/400 and iSeries users is changing, and he is trying to keep Omni User viable in the context of those changes. For example, before the Internet was such a powerful presence, "the user group was a source of information for things you couldn't easily get," he said. "In large part, we [the user groups] are competing with the online sources. We have to provide things that aren't provided online."

Online classes and computer-based training are becoming more available to users. Last month, for example, Manta Technologies began offering its popular AS/400 tutorials over the Web. Before that, they were sold and distributed as CD-ROMs that loaded onto PCs.

"We're competing with everybody else in turning out a quality product. We're no different than anybody else that way," Herman said. "Just like anything else, people have more choices. Online education is a very viable option today. But what we can offer, that an online education cannot, is contact with the developers themselves. That's where we become viable: giving people hands-on experience."

Computer-based education--particularly interactive sessions done over the Web--has great potential in many areas of life, not just OS/400 education, says Martin, who has a degree in education and has worked as a teacher. However, it's not quite there yet. "At this point in time, nobody has found a model that will work," he said.

When the model does become viable, will user groups embrace it? Maybe. But it's doubtful they'll be able to do it themselves. Few traditional user groups have the resources to hire a full-time staff to take care of their static Web sites, let alone to start building the very basics of interactivity such as forums.

Perhaps OS/400 user groups are destined to provide another role--to console members and to provide camaraderie in an increasingly alienating IT environment. "I almost think they treat users groups more as a clearinghouse for information than for education," Martin said. "There's a lot of finding out what's out there: 'What are you guys doing?' or 'Do I need Java training?' You follow the herd. There's safety in a herd. There are too many technologies to keep up with."

The educational viability of user groups--the ability of members to teach each other newer technologies--is made worse by the fact that the average age of a user group member increases by about one year, every year. There are just very few new members joining user groups that are fresh out of college, or even under the age of 35, for that matter.

Of course, the age problem is one that is affecting the entire OS/400 market, not just the user groups. For many younger Unix, Linux, and Windows programmers and operators, the idea of joining a user group that meets once a month is probably a foreign concept. Generation Xers are more likely to congregate in online user groups and collaborate with their peers in virtual settings than seek education in a formal user group environment.

Should user groups do more to make themselves attractive to younger users, who may not be as receptive to older forms of education? Is the generation gap threatening to do in the OS/400 platform and take user groups with it? Some answer yes to both of those questions.

"User groups will fall by the wayside, unless they change," Martin continued. "What the older generation calls education is not what the younger generation calls it. With the younger generation, it's 'Do you feel good?' Whereas, with the older generation, it was 'Shut up, or I'll hit you with the stick again.'"

Editor's Note: This is the second article in our special series of reports on OS/400 user groups. Next week, we'll take another look at the issues affecting the country's 95 OS/400 user groups. See the first article in this series: "Special Report: The State of OS/400 User Groups"