RE: SSA steps on COMMON - might this be a broader trend for LUGs?

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Speaking as someone who has attended several SSA conferences, I personally
think that the current management of SSA is just oblivious.  They probably
never heard of COMMON.
</snip>

Consider this if you will.  A while back COMMON's board decided that it
needed to have true professionally trained educators to turn the COMMON
conference into an education conference.  They went out and hired a bunch
of folks, even some with PhDs. When that happened, the "projects" were
ditched in favor of the current "Course of Study" structures, and almost
all of the nontechnical content was removed from the conference,   COMMON
no longer discusses Manufacturing, Distribution, or Shop Floor or, .... (
you get the picture) That's when IT management stopped coming to COMMON,
there was no reason to.   A year goes by and the "professional educators"
are gone, but we are still left with the current content, all technical.
Great stuff, yes, but all technical.

The other conferences offered by the OEM vendors now fill in many of the
gaps that COMMON left .  They talk about MRP, shop floor, distribution,
RFID, etc as it is used with the software they provide.  Not necessarily
technical, how to program it.  They don't care about COMMON because it is
not complimentary to what they offer, and for the most part, the folks that
would ordinarily attend an SSA, JDE, JBA, Infinium, or any other OEM
conference are not the ones that would come to COMMON, except of course
maybe the programmers.

So, it is SSA that is oblivious, or is it COMMON?

Jim Oberholtzer