System i Addict

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I am going to establish some items here. I live in Colorado. I have been to a hand full of FRUIG meetings. I have made contact with many of the IBM staff in Denver and I know Lonnie and others connected to FRIUG. I was not in the day to day operations of FRIUG. I did attempt to help them with a number of things over a two year time span.

So with that established. Let me take what Lonnie says bit by bit and explain it from my stand point, keeping in mind I am not anti-Lonnie, rather I don’t think the FRIUG in Denver was very good at knowing who their target market was and they catered the meetings to those eight people who always attended.

“I think user apathy was responsible for discontinuing the Front Range IBM User Group,” says Lonnie Kendall, the president of the Denver-area group when the decision was made to pull the plug in December. “We were having the same eight people show up for each meeting. Nobody was interested in joining. We went from monthly meetings to quarterly meetings to closing the doors.”

It is sad that Denver lost the Front Range IBM User Group. I am truly very sad, but at the same time my head is thinking of all the reasons from my perspective as to why it may have failed. The same eight people showed up I think is inaccurate. This is an exaggeration on Lonnie’s part. The fact that eight poeple kept shoing up should also key you off to the problems that were there.

At times it was 3 and at other I had seen over 20. So this doom and gloom is created by the group, and the constant that IBM does not care about them was a point I tried to bring up with a few people but only got ignored. If you think IBM is ignoring you then you will eventually spread that like a cancer and everyone starts to believe it. I know many people in the Denver area that have attended at least one FRIUG meeting and never went back for one reason or another.

Mainly because the eight who were always there were very self involved and didn’t want any outside or new help. The other reason was relevance. The topics had to be relevant to the community. The eight people who showed up catered the topics to their needs and for the rest of us in the area there was no reason to go find out how to do free flow RPG, put CL in your RPG, or how to compile Pascal on the iSeries. Pascal is a learning language and is not meant for production level applications and especially Enterprise solutions.

People don’t realize the value of networking, Kendall says. “They don’t want to take four hours out of their evening or afternoon to go to a meeting. If they need education they go out and do a Webcast or a search on Google or they go to IT Jungle.”

It would have been the same eight people who showed up and of them none of them seemed to interested in networking outside of their group. Not to say they were not capable of working outside the group but they didn’t seem interested at all about new blood or help of anykind.

I can give an example of this. I wanted to be apart of the group and contribute and make it stronger so I attend a few meetings. There was a “personality” named Robert Tipton who seemed to only want to talk to the people of the users group when he needed them to do something for him or you were a “C” level contact. Other than that Bob had little to no use for you. Unfortunately Bob also used the group to help him and manipulated the group for their contacts and such to gain a better footing in Colorado and the surround areas. When you have people who don’t give back to the group and try to do everything they can to suck the life out of it you are eventually going to run dry.

I had many times when I ran into Bob and he made a point to either leave while talking or avoid the conversation. Grated I had nothing to offer him but conversation so that may have been why he often left without much to say. We can talk more about Robert later. He is a very successful person who claims to have written a pamphlet book which he sold at the meetings for a ridiculous sum. I think Bob is funny, bit I deagree with many of his ideas and lectures about IT. I am allowed to do that as I have an opinion and a blog.

Other than Robert the people who did attend were a mixed bag. You always had Lonnie there and Mark from ISS, there were always others from other places but these were the two main road blocks people getting things done.

Kendall’s frustration with the indifference shown by System i, iSeries, and AS/400 professionals boils over into anger due to the lack of interest by IBM in its OS/400 community.

This is just out and out funny. IBM was more than happy to talk more about what to with the users group in Denver. I had many conversations about the user group with many people at IBM. I was also told by IBM about all the calls that were made to FRIUG to help out and were either ignored or rejected.

When I was attending the meetings there was talk of a new contact at IBM and none for the users group. I would have to wonder if it didn’t have to do with the leaders of the group and their inability to branch out and really get the new people in the community, like me, to help out and become apart of the group. I just had lunch with IBM and I did start up the Lotus Users Group in Denver last year and they were talking to me about what we could do? Funny they seem to have ideas I think the group just needed some fresh blood, but the “8″ and I am going to call it from now on ran most of them off or never made them feel welcome. Not to say that the 8 were not nice or polite, they were, but they didn’t seem open to new ideas and they didn’t seem like they wanted any help.

The absence of IBM support for the Front Range LUG is more than a bit embarrassing. Kendall points out that IBM has a sizable presence in Denver, with a disaster recovery center, a large tech center, and an office in Boulder.

I may be wrong but the IBM presents at Boulder is not a heavy iSeries or AS/400 presence. It’s more infrastructure, but I could be wrong as I have never been over there and ask everyone what they do at IBM.

IBM as I remember it was presenting at the meetings on a regular basis and the group seemed to attract the most obscure IBM people on the face of Rochester. Rochester has some very odd and very smart people who can come present and FRIUG seems to attract them. I attended two meeting in two months that really smart IBM people who started the conversation with words I had never heard of and ended it by explaining how to do things on the iSeries at the assembly code level. Please someone tell me how that helps me Admin and iSeries better. Granted interesting but not topical or relevant. I think this is the theme I am driving at, the user group is not and was not relevant to the community and needed to die in order for it to be started again, reborn if you will. I do hope that someone will pick up the ball and try a go at it again.

There’s a two-edged sword aspect to IBM’s involvement with local user groups. It’s needed to some degree, but it is also pushed away when it begins to feel like influence pedaling. The LUGs strive to maintain a level of autonomy and are sensitive to being served the Big Blue Kool-Aid without a break.

Sure this is a known quantity with a users group. You have to have everyone present ideas and have to limit the “selling” time to the end of the meetings. Members are to present their ideas, their wins and they failures. The group is supposed to learn from each other, not try to talk about technology that is 15 years old and that the iSeries is moving away from.

We all have to drink the cool-aid to an extent, we are all apart of the community and sometimes it’s apart of the trade off to keep the LUG running. I welcome the IBMers to come and present, but I see Lonnie calling IBM “THE MAN” than he does calling them partners. IBM would rather support users groups than run them but you have to have them import Rochester SME’s to get that job done or contact VAR’s to bring in SME’s either way you have to take the pitch, with IBM is more limited as they know you are customer and are now looking for solutions.

For now that is all I can talk to on this topic, I have no exposure with the Pheonix group and will save my comments on COMMON at this point.

I would like to point out a few things. I tried right after I moved to Colorado to become involved and for about 7 or 12 months I struggled with Mark of ISS to give me a shot at remaking the web site for them and getting it a better look that might attract a bigger base and create some on-line activity in order to create a need to come meet. I wanted to make the on-line community strong so the local community would want to meet and talk more.

No one at FRIUG saw it my way and I came to the realization that they wanted to keep heading down the same road they had been going down. In the end Mark would never give me the go ahead to update the site and create a new look for the LUG. At one point I called Lonnie and asked him to help me, help Mark, help the LUG get a new site up and running and was told to leave it alone.

They were not accepting of new members and also were not open to new ideas coming from these people, even though month after month I would get asked about topics and would submit them and never see them come about.

I grew tired of fighting the group and figured I could get the same community experience on-line from places like COMMON, iSeries News, and others to get my fix and create my community. I heave created a blog, the one you are reading and I think it draws a good many readers from around the community.

You can see by the web site that is still up what was going on when they went down. The board of elections is going on in 2004. There is a listing of the last known memebers of the group. Note that the bulk of this info has not changed since 2003 when I started a move from Atlanta to Denver and was looking for a user group to grow some iSeries roots in Denver. It really saddens me that Lonnie is blaming everyone but the seven who were the ones in charge.

With that said I am going to open up the floor for comments and again this is my opinion and my experience. Others may have seen it another way and that is fine I just wanted to get my side of the story out so that IBM does not look like the bastard in this story, I think the blame could go both ways.