APCUG Reports
April-June 2007

Beginning with the 2004 contest we retained all of the entries, because we felt that a group planning on doing a project may have something to learn by studying what all other groups are doing. You can review these submissions at http://comservice.apcug.org/jerry.htm. The problem is that the way we have been collecting files and presenting them to the judges, there is just a list of files, and there is no way for a group to show what order they should be viewed in, what they feel is most important, etc. This makes the judges job harder, and it also makes it harder for a group planning on doing a similar project to follow things.

For the 2007 competition I want to make some changes. I will be illustrating what I would like to see by referring to what the Tulsa Computer Society's HelpingTulsa project does. To avoid any conflict of interest, I will state here and now that TCS will NOT be entering the contest in 2007.

The main thing I want to change this year is that I want to urge all projects to prepare a website describing exactly what their project does, with all of the How To information on it. We do that for Helping Tulsa. http://helpingtulsa.org/ is basically What We Do, and http://helpingtulsa.org/howto/ describes the HelpingTulsa Computer Refurbishing Procedures. There are several reasons why we find it helpful to maintain these procedures online. One is for the Jerry Award Competition, of course, but even more important is that all of our volunteers, some of whom do their refurbishing work at home, can just refer to the website to see how to do a particular task. We have also shared our techniques with other not-for-profit Computer Refurbishing Projects, and they can keep up to date by referencing our website.

We suggest you add this information to your UG's Web Site, but if for any reason you are not willing to have it on your UG Web Site, APCUG will provide webspace to a community service project of any APCUG Member Group, so you can build your own website for your project.

We do recognize that not all projects will have someone with the web skills to maintain a web page, so in 2007 we will also accept a Microsoft Word document with all text, photos, etc. in it, and when we prepare the entry for the judges we will use Word's Save As Web Page, so the judges will have a series of web pages to judge. If you do your entry as a web site, you can include Power Point slide shows, video, and other such data that may not be supported in an MS Word document.