IMHO: Canceling meetings
There's only one good reason to cancel a UG meeting. So, what do you do if the speaker doesn't show up?
Recently, there was a discussion on the AUGD mailing list about canceling meetings. Reasons suggested was a lack of presenters, cancellation by a vendor and others.
In my mind, there is only one acceptable reason to cancel a meeting: bad weather. Do not place your membership and leaders at risk to get to the meeting. Otherwise, if you have a meeting scheduled, it should happen.
People easily change their attendance patterns if a meeting doesn't happen. There are other reasons for attending than just the topic of the evening.
That said, every program manager should have a back up plan.
Some of the most popular meetings that we have presented are panel discussion by members or even Stump the Expert type Q&A sessions. Some of the topics handled by the panel are
* "What utilities do you depend on?";
* "What shareware programs do you recommend?" or
* "How do you..." use your Mac?, backup, etc.
The important thing here is to keep it fresh. If you setup a topic in January as a back-up go ahead and use it for a meeting by June. And then setup a new back-up. Also, the fact that the panel knows they will actually be doing a presentation, means that they will do some time planning.
I've posted a collection of Bill Achuff's favorite meeting ideas, so if you come up short just take a look at these...
Great UG Meeting Topics
I invite your comments below... or add your favorite meeting topics to the comments section of Bill's meeting ideas
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