The meeting in Cambridge was a series of unit meetings plus a group
meeting of all there.
  I will try to present a personal view of what happened, in small
parts and covering what I thought most vital.

Basically, DECUS has been experiencing serious declines in symposium
attendance and in all other activities, all over the world, and the
US Chapter BoD and MC have heard presentations suggesting that a
cliff may loop near ahead. (aside: I believe the notion of a
discontinuity is a myth, but certainly the changes/losses in the
aerospace industry are feeding a lot of current employment drops
and this perception, and they will not soon be reversed.)

The chapter has gotten used to working with lots of meetings and
activities which frankly it cannot now afford. When I started attending
symposia, there were 2000 or so people at each, and finances were
no problem. But there were also many less meetings anywhere else, and
less other things being tried, especially things that cost money.
DECUS can't go into debt to keep running; we are not the government,
and if we continue burning money on meetings, we may not be able to
hold symposia, and there goes the chapter...

Therefore the first day and a half covered a generic "need for change"
and its psychology. Some interesting things appeared, including the
fact most present felt their units were doing OK, but that they believed
the DECUS chapter as a whole was wedged, and a survey that was taken
before the meeting indicated LOTS of distrust when questions about
DECUS as a whole were asked.
  This was interpreted by some as a "not in MY backyard" reaction, but
I believe the explanation is simpler and has to do with some major
screwups in procedures at Las Vegas, still fresh in the minds of
most who were there. Remember, these are mostly people in MC "units",
not generic volunteers who put on sessions/seminars, write articles,
contribute software to library or sig tapes, answer questions, etc.,
but people also involved in trying to deal with futures for different
pieces of the organization.
   At Las Vegas, when the financial situation became clear (i.e., final
figures for attendance were then available), MC took it upon itself
to specify a great deal of detail about what could and could not be
done with each of its component units, with mostly no consultation of
the volunteers doing most of the work at all, nor any chance to
object that the financial gains claimed might be based on incorrect
information. In particular, I've been on the library committee for some
time. We got a threat that said, in effect, "either library, commcomm,
and decuserve merge, or we disband them all". This was based on
incorrect information about what "savings" were to be realized, incorrect
because the groups had all previously cut their planned meetings almost
completely to save the same money in any case.
   Personally, this felt like being run over by a truck or some similar
amusement, seeing that neither I nor my colleagues were even told about
this till after it happened, and our work and opinions were valued at
nothing whatsoever. I understand that this sort of high-handedness
existed in many other areas, and to my mind it totally accounts for the
distrust in the survey. I believe this was a broken process...somewhat
understandable, in that people in panic are not at their best
judgment, but nevertheless broken. (The MC chair told us he does not so
believe, BTW.)
   At any rate, it is clear that we've got to make some fairly drastic
changes quickly or go out of business.
   I spoke with several people about what was to happen to SIGs, since
I've always found them to be places where likeminded people gather
and share information. Tell those people in large numbers who they're
"allowed" to associate with, and you can very quickly lose so many
volunteers the society melts down REAL fast. Not everyone will stay
around to wait for another truck...
   The plans SIG council have discussed appear to be in no danger of this.
As I understand things, SIGs will go back to something closer to the model
before the more expensive addons got added on; they will remain places
for folks to gather, share information, and so on, but the expensive stuff
(woods meetings, budgeting, Ghod knows what all else) gets merged into
a few service groups. Suddenly being a SIG (tug?) gets a lot easier.
Steering committees are likely to become more important again...
I see this as goodness, both financially and from the point of view of
people who do sessions/talk together/write papers/write software/etc.
who will have more chances to do these things without some of the
distractions of fiddling with money. The SIG council's plans covered
a great deal more, and looked like a darn good blueprint for the
society to be reorganized, at the "managerial" level, in a way that
deals properly with a volunteer group. (It cannot be approximated by a
corporation in my opinion.)
   I look forward to seeing this run.
   Now as to the library, which I can speak in more detail about.
   For background, for several years, the number of new packages
submitted to the library and sales of packages measured in dollars
have been declining. (Number of bytes has been increasing, since these
tend to be larger submissions, by the way.) We believe that there are
several effects contributing to this:
  1. Networks are becoming more important. Many folks get lots of the
	material they get by networks. Even the sig tapes are being
	most importantly distributed this way, rather than just on
	the old media-copy-tree method, though the latter remains
	important. (We've been sending the sigtapes to wuarchive.wustl.edu
	for some time now almost as soon as they get released.)
  2. The core DECUS audience is technically aware, and much more likely
	than your average garden-variety computer user to know about 
	networks and how to use them.
  3. The visibility of the library, and DECUS as a whole, is not large
	and probably dropping. Part of this has to do with the catalog
	not being mailed to every member automatically, but the
	problem is much broader than that.
  4. The library is probably seen as a VAX/VMS collection only, and of
	little relevance to other platforms. This is not the case, and
	the reality is that its collection of unix, pc, mac, amiga,
	and other software dwarfs most FTP archives, but given minimal
	information, we are seen like this.

   We believe that it is possible that (1) above could make any copy-media
archive questionable in the very long term, though this is not clear. People
do buy books even though community libraries may lend the same books free.
But our audience clearly is now biased to people who will not do this.

   We do have a strategy to deal with this. Its essence is to reach out
well beyond our current customer base and to become more tightly integrated
with the rest of the computing industry. The idea is to turn what is now
just the DECUS library into a part of a larger aggregation which will
become the definitive archive of freely distributable software and
other information, and to contribute to the indexing and availability of
that software and information in various ways. The vision here can ultimately
include the entire DECUS organization, and go well beyond it.

  To get this started ("you don't start building with the Brooklyn Bridge")
we have begun a joint effort with wuarchive.wustl.edu, which is one of
the largest FTP archives in the world and currently the site for development
of numerous networking tools. We have produced a 2-CD set, with a unix
emphasis, of materials obtained from dumps of wuarchive, and with some
indices on the CDs. This is (if all works as planned) to be the first of
a long series which ultimately will let us distribute new materials from
the Internet archive on CD. Eventually we plan a totally shared software
collection, and the library will do media copies on CD (or whatever
follows it in the future) while the FTP site will handle network
distribution. The opportunity for improved cataloguing is obvious,
and we plan to work on that also.
   The 2 CD set is to be priced at $69 for the set. Since most of the
material on wuarchive is compressed, this represents several gigabytes
of material, all from one source.
  It is essential that we advertise its availability widely. Any help
ANY of you can give is vital for this. I'm expecting the package to
be available within a couple weeks; it was sent to the mastering site
a couple weeks ago. (It is now 2/24/1993). Advertising money is hard
to come by, seeing the Society is in financial deep yogurt, so other
help is vital.
   Clearly, the joint effort with wuarchive will be relevant to the
entire computing industry, and is not VMS specific, DEC specific, or
anything close. Hopefully it can give DECUS some exposure as a group
doing things relevant to computing in general & unix etc. in particular
which will make it easier to get people to symposia etc. as well as
do deal with the library.

  Another initiative we have is that DEC has indicated some willingness
to distribute a DECUS CD packed with its Alphas. We are putting that
together now. The CD will contain a number of Alpha packages ported
by DECUS volunteers, plus the library information and a browser tool,
as well, in the hope this will let all Alpha customers of DEC know the
DECUS organization and library exist. Some of the materials on the CD
are VMS, some are for OSF1.

  Apart from these, the library has obtained some interesting packages
lately, notably CMU TCP/IP, and various folks are moving VAX software
over to Alpha, so some pickup in the other library activities may
occur just because we've crossed from the decline of the VAX in
the industry to the rise of the Alpha (AXP) architecture. (How do 
you pronounce AXP??? Is this because they didn't want to go back to
PDP???...I'd have loved to see a PDP30 or some such appear...) :-)

   Now as to the merging. We finally have heard some technical rationale
for merging Lib, CommComm, & Decuserve, and being as the groups are
friendly & reasonable people have pretty well gotten the human
interaction side of the merging squared away at the meeting. Hopefully
the increased cataloguing of information that is an implicit possibility
of the wuarchive initiative will be easier to make run with some of
the other groups; there are skills there which the library committee
has been short of. Note however that people interested in making some
of these things run are welcome to volunteer and places can be found
within them, whether the folks with the skills & interest have been
involved in any DECUS activities before or not. One thing that is
changing is that the committees will not be solely made up of SIG
representatives; membership will depend mostly on doing work as
a volunteer in some capacity or other.

Summary:
   The financial situation is somewhat frightening, and I hope and
pray we can get through it and bring other goodness to fruition. There
is much to be done, and the most important parts for the long term are
not internal reorganization, but the reaching more of the world and
being relevant to the computing industry in the future, not only to
one another today. Tell your friends.

Glenn Everhart