STARTING (OR JOINING!) A JAVA USER'S GROUP Java User's Groups Info Page | Java User's Groups Worldwide How do you start a JavaTM User's Group (JUG)? How do you find one near you? What do they do at these distinguished gatherings? Here's a wonderful compendium of advice and anecdotes from Rayme Jernigan of the Triangle Java User's Group in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. by Rayme Jernigan Research Triangle Park JUG An Inexpensive Introduction to Starting a JUG My out of pocket expense for starting a JUG was the $10 needed to open a JUG bank account, and I got that back. But starting a JUG from the bottom up is a lot of work. It's hard to quantify exactly how much of my time it took early on, but 10-25 hours per week is in the ball park. Nonetheless it is very rewarding, personally and professionally, and has been well worth the effort. This article reflects my own personal biases and is not intended to describe the only way to start a JUG. I'd encourage you to deviate from the procedures described here wherever your personal preferences dictate. Topics covered in this article: Is there already a JUG near me? How do I get started starting a JUG? What should I focus on at the organizational meeting? What should our meetings be like? When should we hold our meetings? How much should we charge? Should we incorporate? How can we get freebies? Should we have an email list? Should we have a web site? How do we track the membership? What about corporate partners? Do you have any more pointers? Is there already a JUG near me? Before launching a new Java User's Group, the first thing to check, of course, is whether there's already one in your area that you can join. There are so many Java User's Groups sprouting up around the world that you may discover there's a newly thriving JUG right nearby. Check out the list of Java User's Groups Worldwide to see if there's a JUG in your area. But if there's no JUG where you live, maybe you should start one!

How do I get started starting a JUG? In starting a JUG, your first goal should be to hold an organizational meeting. To do this you need people, and a meeting place. There are a few places you may be able to get both. Here in the North Carolina Research Triangle, the Sun Microsystems sales office was a helpful resource for getting us off the ground. They helped by providing occasional hardware loaners, suggestions for meeting places and speakers. They also ran a Java User's Group "commercial" for us whenever they spoke to groups about Java here. University computer science departments are also good places to visit. In addition to a meeting room, they may also have the equipment you'll need for Java meetings such as overhead projectors, computer screen projectors, computer equipment, and Internet access in the meeting room. Post flyers on the CS department bulletin boards, and ask around to find the professor who's really excited about Java and sell them on being your in-university point-person and evangelist. If there's going to be a local talk about Java, or about peripheral topics (e.g. anything to do with a server), ask the speaker in advance to announce that you are forming a Java User's Group and that anyone who's interested should stop by and see you after the talk. Get email addresses. You can also contact interested participants by posting a request for comments to the appropriate newsgroups saying something like "we're planning to start a Java User's Group in this area. Do you think this is a good idea? If there is enough interest, we'll hold an organizational meeting." This approach has a distinct advantage over just posting a meeting announcement and seeing who shows up: if you ask for a response you will have the email address of the respondents and be able to contact them for organizational purposes, and to announce future meetings.

What should I focus on at the organizational meeting? Focus first of all on making it a fun meeting, so people will come back. Somewhere in the meeting you should try to identify future speakers. You also should ask anyone who wants to be notified of future meetings to send you email (for reasons just discussed). We found during our first meeting that after a few introductory words, the attendees were quite content to be left to their own devices, talk about Java, and swap Java rumors. In fact we had to move everybody outside after an hour and a half to close the building. Most meetings still end that way. You might also look around for motivated (and balanced) individuals to help you get things moving. In our case, we hooked up with a three-person start-up (Prominence Dot Com) and these three people became our first three speakers! They also became part of an interim board of nine directors a couple of months later, and we couldn't have done it without them.

What should our meetings be like? Listen to your membership. We wondered early about how to transit the Java space of topics and concluded that anything technical will be well supported. The monthly topics that we've covered, beginning on January 1996 are: The Java Abstract Windowing Toolkit; a Tutorial Applets for WebMasters JavaFest (an afternoon conference with several speakers) Java Network Programming Distributed Computing in Java Sun Microsystems Presents the Java Media API JDBCTM - Database Connectivity for the Future Real World Applications (how six products were developed) What JavaScriptTM Can Do For You Eleven, by Visix Microsoft-The Big Picture: Java, J++, ActiveX Stingray Software/The AWT A Night with IBM-Java Trends and Directions High-Tech Startup-What it Takes/JDBC-A Hands-On Starter Kit We talked for a while about whether we should permit product demos in meetings that people also pay for. The position we wound up with was that these are intrinsically useful to developers, and so we allowed them. We do, however, try to encourage vendors to give us something else in the meeting besides the demo, and this seems to work pretty well. The agenda for a typical meeting might look something like this: 6:30 Coffee 7:00 JUG Announcements 7:10 The Presentation 8:30 Q and A 8:40 Attendee Announcements, Meet People, More Coffee 9:00 Close Doors The meeting place and AV equipment will probably be your biggest expense. For us the AV equipment was as expensive as the facilities, and facilities that had AV equipment available were inherently more expensive. So if you can find adequate facilities that are freely available, or if you can find a sponsor to help pay for them, you have done yourself a big favor.

When should we hold our meetings? We held our meetings at night, simply because it was much simpler for us to do so. Many people couldn't just leave work for an afternoon once a month. But we did have a JavaFest event with multiple speakers that covered an entire afternoon. It was extremely successful. Over two hundred people attended, and we might have had another hundred if we had more seating available. So why didn't we do his every month? First, this was special event, and was kicked off by a Sunergy satellite downlink with the Java development team, including Arthur Van Hoff. Secondly, it took a lot of time to set up. We're glad we did it, but we probably couldn't do it every month. If you do set up a JavaFest event, it will help if you have a sponsor to bear the brunt of the footwork and promotion. If you do work with a sponsor, remember to talk to them up front about any preferences you may have about the agenda and how the event will be promoted. But be very sensitive to the needs of the sponsor. After all, they're paying for it. In addition to regular monthly meetings, you may be able to hold other special events in the same month. There's no rule that says you can't, if you have the time to set it up and post the announcement. For example we did a couple of no-cost evening videotape showings of Java-related Sunergy satellite broadcasts. The quality of these was very good, and the videotape showings were very easy to do. (You can get Sunergy broadcast schedules and order Sunergy tapes via the Web. For additional Sunergy information you can contact Vicki.Pedretti@Corp.Sun.COM -ed).

How much should we charge? The Triangle Java Users Group settled on $50/year for memberships which includes the price of attendance and eligibility for door prizes and other perks; or $5 at the door for non-members. We settled on this price because we felt that charging more than $5 at the door would be a hardship on students. This in turn drove the $50 annual fee... more than this would encourage everyone to pay at the door.

Why not let students in for free? Almost everyone in the Triangle is a student.

Why do you have to charge for the meetings at all? You don't, but there will be expenses. We have had to rent facilities and equipment on several occasions. These sometimes cost several hundred dollars for a single meeting. And so not every meeting generated a profit. In addition, some nationally known speakers may request some expense or travel money (we have only done this once). Expenses will depend on the scope of your group, and smaller groups will cost less. And some may cost almost nothing. Just be careful not to discount the need to think ahead a little and be thrifty, especially at the beginning.

Should we incorporate? I can't offer legal advice, but many groups in the United States incorporate -- especially if they are collecting money. Remember that unless you gain non-profit status, you will be required to pay taxes on membership fees and at-the-door receipts. In addition, many types of assistance and support may be available to you as a not-for-profit corporation that you might not receive otherwise. There are different requirements in the U.S. for state and federal not-for-profit filings. Try to enlist the support of a law firm that deals in software intellectual property issues to help you with this. Many are glad to do so as a community service. In our case, we have been charged only out-of-pocket filing fees amounting to one or two hundred dollars. The tedious legal work and considerable hand-holding has been done by our sponsoring law firm at no cost. And an attorney from our sponsoring firm now has a permanent role in the JUG as legal council and attends all of the board meetings. There also may be not-for-profit requirements that relate to being strictly vendor-independent, so be careful about becoming too partisan. Talk to your attorney about the particulars.

How can we get freebies? There is a surprising amount of cool free stuff available just for the asking. IDEs, Java books, Java Training CDs, magazines, Java product T-shirts, conference discounts, training discounts and so on. We are only beginning to actively pursue vendors to get as many of these freebies for our membership as possible, but have already given away hundreds and hundreds of dollars of stuff from vendors who have sought us out, unbidden, to give away promotional items to our membership.

Should we have an email list? JUG member Joe Coulombe enjoying a break. Yes. After the first few meetings were held and the monthly routine was established, we asked a kindly sponsor to set up a majordomo email list so that local people interested in Java could ask questions and communicate directly. We now use the majordomo as our principal channel of communication; an open microphone for the local Java community. All meeting announcements are posted there. We do not require the list subscribers to be JUG members, but do request that only people in our local geographic area post to the list. "Newsgroup rules" are waived. Postings for local jobs are encouraged. Everyone is asked to be polite and tolerant, and I'm sure the knowledge that members of the list are potential customers and employers has gone a long way toward making it happen. To my knowledge no individual has ever been flamed on our majordomo list. Good for us. Bandwidth has been comfortable, and it has not been necessary to moderate.

Should we have a web site? Not until you find someone who is willing to maintain the site. Nothing looks more lame than a users group web site that is out of date, and out of data. We have been lucky enough to have a volunteer webmaster from the JUG membership maintain our site for us. He is also responsible for making our site more visible on the web. When the meeting announcements are made to the majordomo, he snags them and the web site is updated "automatically." In our case, the purpose of the web site is to tell everything we can about ourselves: how to become a member, whom our contacts are, when our meetings are, and who the people and companies who help us are. Whenever we get email requesting information about the JUG, we just reply with just the JUG URL, a "Thanks for your interest," and a "Let us know if you have any more questions." They almost never do. Our web site is at http://www.jughead.org, if you want to take a look.

How do we track the membership? Because almost everyone interested in Java will have email, we took the position that we should conduct all of our business either through email or at meetings. Nothing goes through slo-mail. There are no stamps, envelopes, or bills. Members are checked off of a list at the door prior to each meeting, and membership renewals are handled the same way. There is an open issue of whether you should have all memberships fall in the same time period and pro-rate new members who join within that period; or always charge the full annual amount and track the membership renewals individually. The advantage to the first method is that everyone will always be completely clear on when to renew. The advantage to the second method is that everyone will always be completely clear on what it will cost to join. We use the second method, for what it's worth. More advice: Buy a cash box and open a JUG bank account. Count your receipts at the end of the meetings and distinguish between new member receipts and non-member general admissions. Make your deposits promptly and DO NOT mix the JUG money with that of your own personal bank account.

What about corporate partners? We have relied many times on friendly corporations for things such as JUG event promotion, legal services, meeting facilities and equipment, the majordomo, a web site, web site maintenance, and the occasional CPU. Whenever someone helps you like this, be sure you recognize it enthusiastically at the meetings, on the majordomo, on your web site, and anywhere else you find appropriate. Sun's Maureen Chew talks to the Research Triangle JUG You may also be able to set up categories of corporate memberships, and solicit corporations to become corporate members. What you get from these memberships may include facilities, equipment, services, and extra funding. What you give to these memberships may include various types of recognition and perhaps other perks like board membership, membership on an advisory board, or bundled seats for corporation employees at JUG meetings. (Make sure you don't give away more seats than you have). The particulars will depend on your needs, and the needs of the corporate partners.

What is my JUG "exit strategy?" Almost a year after the first meeting, we held our first elections. The "object of the game" for us was to get past this milestone in such a manner that the JUG would become a stand-alone entity with an elected board of directors, flourishing without being dependent on a particular person. (This has been a considerable relief to the particular person). This will not always be possible for any number of reasons, including the level of Java interest and activity in your particular area, but I do think it's worthwhile goal.

Do you have any more pointers? Here are a few final things to keep in mind: Be friendly, honest and open Cooperate instead of competing with other technology users groups in your area Appreciate and recognize the efforts of corporate partners, legal council, vendors, the board members, your webmaster and other volunteers Listen patiently to members who are way too excited about things you have no control over Wear blue jeans to meetings Avoid the appearance of using the JUG for personal gain And most importantly, have fun! See also: Java User's Groups Info Page (java.sun.com/aboutJava/jug/index.html) Java User's Groups Worldwide (java.sun.com/aboutJava/jug/usergroups.html) Research Triangle Park JUG (www.jughead.org) Special thanks to Cynthia Pyun, Frank Greco, Rick Loek, Tony Welch, John Hoffmann, and the members of the Research Triangle Park Java User's Group!

[ This page was updated: 17-Mar-99 ]

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