Meeting Notes - Our First Meeting - 08-13-09

We had our first meeting yesterday evening. It was a small group (4 people), but this gave us the opportunity to do a lot a sharing about who we are, what are the goals of the group, what we are looking to get out of these meetings, how often to meet, and a question and answer session about some computer technology.

First, I want to cover the business stuff regarding our group meetings. We decided that we would meet twice a month. The 2nd and 4th Thursday of every month. The time will be 5:00 pm, and the place will be "The Chocolate Cafe", where we held our meeting yesterday evening. We all agreed that we really like The Chocolate Cafe. The food is really good, service is great and the place is clean, nice decor, and it has a really nice atmosphere.

We also talked about the name of the group, "Elevate User Group". Most people don't know what a user group is, so we decided that we should make the name more descriptive. We decided on "Free Computer Learning" (Leigh came up with this name. Thanks Leigh). We not only wanted to be clear about the fact that the meeting is focused on computer learning, but that is also a free meeting for our local community.

We also discussed ways of making more people aware of what we are doing and hopefully get more people to attend our meetings. We feel that there may be other people who would not only enjoy attending these meetings, but would also find these meetings helpful in learning more about the computer. We wanted various ways of reaching people that involved the internet and non-internet (such as newspapers, newsletters, flyers, etc..). A lot of the people we are trying to reach, may not use the internet very much or at all.

Here are some of the ways we discussed: letting the local Moose Lodge know about what we are doing and see if they would put something in their newsletter (Larry said he would take this task on), seeing if the Greeneville Sun would do a write up about what we are doing (this was a great suggestion offered by David), and putting something on Craig's List (my suggestion).

Our question and answer session covered these topics: what is twitter, what is a blog, how to email resumes, computer hardware failures and software scanning.

Some topics for future meeting would be: covering the basics for Microsoft Word (MS Word), Microsoft Excel (MS Excel), Microsoft PowerPoint (MS PowerPoint), how to email a resume or other files, how to find information on the internet, GMAIL, and navigating Windows XP folder system.

I let everyone know that I could cover the basics on these topics to get folks started, but they would really need to continue their learning at home or somewhere else. I also expressed to everyone that there are free tutorials on the internet and there are a lot of video tutorials on youtube.com that are free and very helpful, but they would be required to follow-up on this on their own time. I can provide some links for everyone as part of the meeting when we cover various topics.

One of our goals was to get everyone using this blog. We talked about how to access it and how we could use this blog as our online repository of information, but also as a way for the group to communicate between meetings. So, hopefully everyone at the meeting last night is reading this – smile.

All in all, I feel that this was a really good start. I'm not sure where we are going with this, but the journey has begun.....