CFOG's PIP, July 1986, Volume 4 No. 9, Whole No. 45, page 1

President's Message

It's been a very busy month for CFOG. At the July 10th Board meeting we reviewed several suggestions for future planning that have been offered by members. Here are a few of the highlights:

• We approved a proposal to modify our Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation to reflect the diversity of computers that we now support. We also approved a motion to seek non-profit charitable organization status. We commissioned Ben Cohen, attorney at law, to draft the proposed changes. We agreed to pay him twice his annual salary as Editor of PIP for his services <smile>. The proposed changes will be submitted to the membership for approval at a General Meeting to be announced later in the year. We rejected a motion to change our name to CFOG from Chicago's First Osborne Group.
  
  
• We continued to discuss the need to attract new members and perhaps old members who have abondoned CFOG during their exodus from the CP/M community. We agreed that the way to attract membership would be to increase our services and benefits, and modify our advertising campaigns.
  
  
• We discussed our current committment to RCP/M's and our expenditures in that area. It was pointed out that 1/3 of our members do not use them and therefore do not benefit from these expenditures. We reaffirmed our committment to Remote Access Systems as our members' best resource for programs and information. To encourage participation by all, we approved the purchase of 3 used modems that may be loaned to members between meetings. We also designated the September 28 meeting for a 'Modem Extraviganza' presentation. Every member is encouraged to bring his or her computer and modem to the meeting. Hands-on training will be conducted, custom software will be made available, and hopefully, every user's questions and software problems will be resolved.
  
  
• In a separate Board Action on August 3rd we discussed a proposal to use our RCP/M's to collect, review and document public domain software for both CP/M and MS-DOS on a much larger scale than we have ever previously attempted. The Board tentatively approved (pending final approval at the regular August Board meeting) an expenditure of $4000 to upgrade each of our RCP/M's to 140 megabytes operating on Osborne Executives to accomplish this task. If this project is successful, CFOG will have the most complete public domain library in existence. I say "If we are successful" because a project of this size will require the efforts of many members to participate in the screening of software.

I am excited about the future of CFOG. In April, when I took office as President of CFOG, we were down to 276 members from 417 at year end 1985. Several observers predicted that CFOG's membership would continue to drop, and that CFOG would eventually be forced out of existence as has been the case with many other CP/M based user groups. Because of the excellent administration of our finances by past Boards, the strong team spirit of our current Board of Directors, and the hard work of several volunteers (not the least of which is our Editor) we have been able to pursue some very ambitious goals. We currently have over 300 members, a figure that is now increasing every month.

Our current plan to develop our library is projected to take two years to reach completion. We will desperately need your help in evaluating programs and documentation during this period, and beyond as new programs are added. We will need both CP/M users and MS-DOS users to participate. I think you'll agree that the end result will be well worth the effort. Imagine being able to dial into a single source for every program you may ever need, and having access to technical help from users around the country who also use our systems. This is only the beginning. Our newsletter and meetings will also improve as a pleasant side effect of increasing our numbers.

For those of you who are skeptical, let me assure you that the funds used for our hardware upgrades are entirely from surplus funds in our bank account. Our operating budget does not rely on these funds, nor will these expenditures raise our expenses beyond the point that our current membership renewals can support. I think we all owe a deep debt of gratitude to the past officers who have given us such an opportunity to grow.

Bill Kuykendall
President, CFOG