Articulate User Groups: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices.

The North Texas Articulate User Group (or NTAUG, based in Dallas) held its first meeting October 22 with approx 20 people in attendance. We pretty much did a get to know each other, discuss the direction of the group and layout a game plan kind of meeting.

Our Dallas ATD chapter's Technology SIG group held a meeting on using Storyline, so I attended and announced the new group starting up to gather contact information for those interested in joining. I then sent out an informational survey to figure out the time that future members prefer to meet, find out where they are located in the DFW metroplex, and topics they'd like to see presented.

Coincidentally, Tom and David were in town in early October for one of their 2-day workshops and I also made an announcement there.

Natalia and Victoria (in Austin leading CTAUG) provided me with excellent advice for getting started!

We opted for meeting quarterly with meetings scheduled for February 4, May 6, August 5, November 4 from 5:00-7:00pm. One of the members volunteered to cover Templates/Custom Color Scheme for the February meeting and we'll do a Challenge Showcase (to start us off, I picked 5 of David's earlier challenges) and General Q&A. We have a list of topics from the survey and the group elected to choose the next meeting topic at each meeting so that our topics are relevant to the group needs.

Our biggest challenge at the moment is the area in which we live. It is tough to choose a meeting location that is convenient for everyone since the Metroplex is so large. For now, we're going to contain ourselves to the North Dallas/Addison/Plano area. There has also been talk of hosting a virtual meeting.

I'd be happy to discuss the NTAUG futher, feel free to shoot me an email at ntexaug at gmail.