Why do we want to start one:

• Teaching one another
• Making Friends
• Save money by buying in the group
• Community for Mac users

Technology to use to run the meetings:

• Katie from the MacCore suggests...

  "I'm envisioning the "final product" of the group to be some form of 

  video podcast that will be a re-broadcast of a live "show" or meeting 

  of the mug, at least to start.Although I have no idea of the 

  technology required to make all this work, that's where you all come in.

   

  Following the format of a traditional MUG meeting, I'm seeing some 

  time at the beginning of the meeting devoted to general question and 

  answer. No specific topic, people can ask questions ranging from 

  troubleshooting to looking for general recommendations for a digital 

  camera. This could be done over audio, but if it were possible to have 

  a group of "panelists" who can answer the questions while screen 

  sharing their laptop in order to help facilitate the answer. For 

  example, if someone asks about a troubleshooting problem, it would be 

  helpful to have someone's screen showing them how to go to the 

  Utilities folder, go to Disk Utility, click their drive icon, and 

  repair disk permissions. Most people are visual learners, and 

  especially newbies will benefit from seeing the steps to take. If 

  someone is looking for the recommendation for a printer and someone in 

  the group recommends a  specific model for their needs, then doing a 

  quick google search to bring up the product page of that printer will 

  be beneficial to the group.

   

  From a technology standpoint, I would see technology such as talkshoe 

  would work to allow a group audio chat, but preferably if there was 

  also some kind of screen-sharing technology we could use as well that 

  would be beneficial. We would also want to record the video and audio 

  somehow so at the end of the meeting, it could all be fairly easily 

  put together into a video podcast format for people who were unable to 

  make the live presentation to download.

   

  Following a general Q&A session, I see a series of segments, perhaps 

  only 2 or 3 to begin with, ranging in length anywhere from 5-20 

  minutes of a more planned program. For example, Wednesday at my MUG 

  I'm giving a presentation on backup methods. I've prepared a general 

  keynote, I'll then be  talking about a variety of backup strategies, I 

  plan to demo live how these strategies work on my computer that is 

  hooked up to a video projector.  I could do this all via recording a 

  screencast locally to my computer. That's an option, but that wouldn't 

  allow me the opportunity to take questions during the presentation.  

  Again, what I'd like t do is some kind of audio and video streaming 

  that would allow me to give the presentation, if someone has a 

  relevant question, correction, or comment they could make that during 

  the presentation and also take a few follow-up questions or comments 

  at the end.

   

  Again, from a technology standpoint, this could be something as basic 

  as recording a screencasts for upload to a website and including in a 

  final video podcast, or if we could find some way to stream audio and 

  video across the net to an entire group of people, that would be 

  ideal, I just don't know if this technology exists and if so how much 

  it costs. iChat screen sharing or iChat theater comes to mind, but 

  that's not going to work on a wide-scale like we're talking about.

   

  At the end of the Q&A session and various presentations, the audio and 

  video from our meeting would then be combined together into a video 

  podcast that we could then distribute through our website.

   

  Okay, so that's my long-term vision of the group. Now you guys tell me 

  what you think , if you have better ideas, and how we make this 

  happen...

• Talkshoe
• Dorothy mentions "I recall Doug Kaye made mention of SlideCasting:

  http://www.blogarithms.com/index.php/archives/2007/07/31/slidecasting-lives/

  http://www.slideshare.net/"

• Victor mentions "As far as the presentations, the low tech version would be to have someone upload a PDF or a Keynote presentation to a server where the "many" could download it prior to the meeting, that way if we do NOT have a net meeting like experience at least the people can follow along.

  The hi tech version as Katie mentions could be a screen cast of the presentation, a Quick Time Keynote version (that is native to Keynote) or a service like NetMeeting  (Yugma) or another

  So there is a service call http://www.yugma.com/  Yugma that is like netmeeting for Mac. I have not tried it with more than one person, so it may be a soilution in that you can in essence give the screen to a presenter  Maybe they want to offer their services to this VMUG as a test of their ability to provide services. If someone want to take the ball and contact them about providing us services in exchange for some buzz, that would be great. "

• Mike King suggests "I think one for Video we can get a free Ustream Account and some one can do something with that and there a Chat room that others can ask Questions of the one putting on a presentation. And for the General meeting we might set up a Talk Shoe Account to host the General Meeting So we do not all ways have to Use Victors TMUP Live Room. I think we need to Make one of our own."
•