A lot has happened in FACUG-land during the past two months so I thought I would send out a brief note on some of the happenings.

Doc Dockery and Ira Kistenberg were re-elected and John Witmer was elected to replace Sharon Rump who is retiring from the FACUG Board of Directors after many years as our Treasurer. Thank you Sharon!

Hank Feinberg, President of the Rockland PC Users Group was elected to the FACUG Board by the BOD.

Sam Wexler was elected President, Stu Silverman was elected Vice-President and John Witmer was elected Treasurer of the Board.

Our 2011 Technology Conference Mexico Cruise from the Port of Tampa was last January and 68% of the post-event survey responders gave it an “A” rating which is obviously excellent.

The FACUG Membership & Leadership Development Forum meeting will be on Saturday, March 19 @ 1PM – 4PM Eastern Time. This meeting puts the User Group experts (our new Board of FACUG Consultants) together with User Groups liaison reps, that have issues in their own groups and come with the hope of finding solutions. This will be our third quarterly remote meeting in cyberspace, where all you need is a PC or Mac to attend. Send an email to forum@ariesmart.com for more information or to attend this meeting.

FACUG has just finished negotiating and signing a new contract directly with Norwegian Cruise Lines for our 2012 Computer & Technology Conference@Sea from January 23-27, 2012. We will be announcing all the really exciting details within the next two weeks. I can at this time inform you, there will be no greater value for a cruise anywhere. In today’s paper, there is an article about NCL raising their rates up to 10% – this does NOT affect us. The APCUG and FACUG annual meetings will both be held at this event. Bookings will start within two weeks and we hope to have more than the 175 cabins/350 people we had last time. The deeply discounted early-bird rates will be valid only until May 15.

One of our sponsors on our last cruise was Keystone Learning Systems (www.keystonelearning.com) who gave us 100 certificates. Each certificate is good for a selection of courses (Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010) that retails for well over $300 and expires on January 31, 2012. They asked we make these certificates available to the people whom we thought did the most to help User Groups and FACUG. Please let me know if you are the FACUG Liaison Advisor for your User Group and would like a free certificate sent to you. If your User Group currently has no FACUG Liaison Advisor, send an email to liaison@ariesmart.com to either nominate yourself for the program or find out more about it.

If you need a very good in-person speaker from our newly formulated FACUG Speakers Bureau for your User Group during the next two weeks, contact me and we will see if Bob Gostischa still has some openings in his schedule for “Protecting Yourself and Your Identity Online”.

FACUG has subscribed to state-of-the-art audio and video software that opens many doors for our membership. It allows us to provide high quality remote access to presenters anywhere in the world. At our March 19 forum meeting where we hope to actually use this software, we would like to have a discussion whereby the attendees can help determine how we can best deploy this cutting edge technology.

As you can see, membership in FACUG has never provided more needed benefits to our member User Groups and this is just the tip of the iceberg! If you have not yet renewed your FACUG membership for 2011, now is the time to do so.

So how are we doing? Should we do more, should we do less; are there programs we are doing that you like, are there programs you dislike. Please hit reply to this email and say as much or as little as you like but please say something. Your FACUG Board of Directors need your feedback on this bold new direction we are taking the Florida Association of Computer User Groups. Thank you.

Sam Wexler
president@facug.org