I believe many user groups can be very successful without an umbrella organization, but, if there was one, what services would you want them to offer?

Evan – You are exactly right that every volunteer needs to decide to commit themselves to it, or move aside. Additionally, those that are committed need to evaluate if they are effective. One of the best things I did as a user group leader, was move aside. I wasn’t effectively growing the group, however as a Regional Mentor, I seem to fit in this role better.

Lastly, I think this kind of discussion is a good thing for the community, but only if something positive comes out of it. Please please please send a list of your complaints directly to the Board. They are having a Board meeting soon, so this is the best time to make it known. i-noram.board@ineta.org daniel.egan@ineta.org

My list of things that need changed:
No review process of any of the volunteers.
Membership Mentors have no impact on INETA itself
Lack
Website (which is much improved and constantly getting better)

I do think it needs to be pointed out that INETA doesn’t provide anyone with the material only the opportunity to be in the speaker bureau. I don’t know the criteria for how speakers are put in the bureau though.
You know some people think devLink is a Microsoft conference, but we are independent. I tried a Java track last year, and the Java community did not show up. We had a mix alternate topics last year, but fewer submissions this year. Could it be that INETA just isn’t getting submissions from the folks who speak on these topics? Are they turning away these speakers? I am asking, I don’t know.

“Ok, I’m calling you out!”

Nice try, but I called you out first. I fail to see how this has any relevancy to the organization as a whole.

I can say that the past couple of months, I’ve pinged a number of people about INETA and usually have gotten the same response (see above) from those who aren’t directly involved in serving within the organization.

It’s this, in particular, that’s caused me to pause and reflect on whether I want to continue to engage in the organization. I need to either become wholly involved or jump out. This post was intended to be one mechanism for gathering feedback before making that decision.

In addition, taking a hard look at what my local user group might look like next year has been on my mind in particular. Specifically, how to get high quality speakers to come and speak. This too, brings me full circle to the intentions of this post.

> How can you complain about an organization that you agreed
> to volunteer as a Regional Membership Mentor, and not even
> participate in the conference calls?

I can’t speak for Evan, but from my own year and a half as Speaker Committee chairman, I can say that it’s hard to get people interested in participating in the same old same old stagnant non-action when an assessment can be made quickly that the organization has been stuck in essentially the same pattern loop for years.

> Most importantly, if you don’t like the way INETA is, send us
> an email, or volunteer to help us change!

This is a cop out. This reminds me of open source project members saying stuff like, “if you don’t like it, you can change it,” and then you open up the source base and find a god awful mess of negligence and vanity.

If INETA is really invested in change, then its first order of business is to clean house and to make the organization more attractive for new blood, and then to recruit that new blood.

Inviting people to come in from the outside to clean your house isn’t a credible or practicable proposition.

The only way that the outside-in approach can work is when it is done as a distributed, organized takeover.

Lastly, you MUST learn to work within the system. Since INETA is also a volunteer organization, there seems to be this expectation that INETA will do all the work for you. Yes, INETA has done a poor job managing expectation though. I ALWAYS recommend doing the following when trying to schedule speaker … contact INETA speakers directly. Find the email address of any speaker you want, and ask them directly if they would come. Very rarely do they refuse!

Most importantly, if you don’t like the way INETA is, send us an email, or volunteer to help us change!

> They do have a self register speakers bureau has anyone
> used that to find speakers?

This isn’t the right customer experience, and CodeZone could have realized this if they had done some customer experience analysis, or even just a little bit of scenario thinking. This feature can be torn apart in analysis in just two moves.

CodeZone was about Doug getting to spend some Microsoft money on building some ASP web apps. I would barely call CodeZone a serious socially and culturally-focused effort. Don’t get me wrong, if I had the budget and the leeway, I might have done exactly the same thing.