We are deep in the middle of planning for 2010 right now. One of the areas we want to continue to invest in (or perhaps raise our investment) is around user groups. Working with user groups can be a tricky topic for us – the best groups are those run completely by customers, and they tend to be the ones who don’t want a lot of interference from NI trying to “sell” them on products. On the flip side, we are often asked for new technical content that can be used for user group presentations.
Feel free to comment on this topic – I’ll create a poll to make it easier to respond:
Physical User Groups
If you are looking for more information on user groups. you can learn about physical user group meetings in your area at http://www.ni.com/usergroups
Virtual User Groups
We have a new capability on our Web site for creating virtual user groups. Most of these are organized around specific topics like “Building Large Apps with LabVIEW” or “RF Testing” and so on. You can see a list of these at http://decibel.ni.com/content/groups
Feel free to comment with any specific ideas for future user group meeting topics you would like to see…
October 24, 2009 at 1:56 pm |
I’ve been to a few User Group meetings and continue to monitor the topics. They’re definitely worthwhile. The last one I attended introduced the JKI State Machine, but an NI representative made an appearance at the end. That felt like a good mix, and I wouldn’t object to more NI influence. After all, many of us make a living using your stuff so it’s often helpful when you try to sell us on new products.
October 25, 2009 at 5:41 pm |
A geographic user group is impractical for me since there aren’t that many users (definitely not advanced users) around here.
The groups at the NI community site are good, and as I’ve said in the past, having NI R&D personnel participate in them would be great (those who already do are highly appreciated). Unfortunately, the communities section has a number of techincal issues which cause it to have some usability problems. I suspect this is part of the reason the groups I’m part of have considerably lower traffic than the NI forums or the LAVA forums.
The virtual live user group meetings NI has seem to be great as well. I don’t think I had a chance to participate in one, but the fact that they’re also available for later viewing makes them usable. Unfortunately, you can only view them as a stream. It would be useful if either the entire Flash app was converted to a file which could be downloaded or if they were also converted to a video file and made available for download like that.