RE: COMMON Virtual Conference

And individual membership is only $140. (This email reminded me and I just renewed.) I maintain my own membership so it travels with me if I change jobs. It's a trivial amount compared with what COMMON has done for my career. Being an active member of COMMON puts money in your pocket if you are employed working on an IBMi.

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Trevor Perry
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2013 9:51 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: COMMON Virtual Conference

John,

There are so many myths propagated in this community, and I see you have bought every one.

When you say "it has a reputation for high-cost membership, high-cost events", you are helping propagate a strange myth. This years Annual conference will cost you a standard rate of $1695. The recent IBM Power Systems Technical University cost $1995. COMMON had 4 days of intense education, PowerTechU had 5 days - of which almost every session was a repeat - to make a total of 2.5 to 3 days worth of education. PowerTechU is always in a high cost city, while COMMON works hard to keep the hotel costs down - I know it was more expensive to stay in Vegas at Caesars than it will be in Austin. The value for money is the story you should be telling, and COMMON wins that hands down. Spreading the myth does not help the community.

You also say "restriction of useful information and resources to members only". What is wrong with that? COMMON is a member organization, and while it supports the community with lots of useful information, free webinars and so on, COMMON would be unable to continue if it gave everything for free. The commercial sites in our industry will require you to join and pay for much of the content, so why are you holding COMMON accountable to a different measure? Seems like another strange myth that is a personal beef that makes no logical sense.

As for us being sorry that you do not pay attention to what is happening in the industry, whether it is COMMON or not, it is a real shame.

Trevor



On 1/7/13 10:29 AM, "John Yeung" <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Sam_L <lennon_s_j@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If you hadn't told me, I would have assumed that this cost money, and
it isn't until you are well into the registration that you actually
find it is free.

The link Pete provided goes to a page where right up top, in big
letters, is "FREE to EVERYONE". I don't know if they put that up
extremely recently (in response to reactions like yours?) or if you
happened to have gone to much less clearly marked pages (it sounds like
maybe you knew about the existence of the conference before Pete gave
the link, and perhaps looked into it via some other route).

And I missed any publicity about it. Presumably I got something in
an e-mail, but I've gotten quite a few recently and assumed it was
about early bird registration and probably ignored it.

I don't remember seeing anything whatsoever about this until Pete's post.

I am not a COMMON member, and I long ago tuned out anything having to
do with COMMON since it has a reputation for high-cost membership,
high-cost events, and restriction of useful information and resources
to members only. I am not saying COMMON isn't worth the cost. I am
just saying I am used to everything COMMON costing money, and I (like
many others) work in an environment where it is extremely difficult to
convince the decision-makers to spend money.

So it's a real shame that this free, virtual, open event was not more
heavily promoted. There are probably people who would have been able
to make a case to their management that carving out some time in their
day for this conference is worth it, had they known about it a couple
of weeks ago, but now it's too late and their time is "already
accounted for".

John

--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.