The future of ODUG...

[Justin Derrick]

So, it's time to have the discussion...  It's approaching 5 years since our last technical conference...  Five since the last Board of Directors meeting, Three since ODUG ceased to exist according to its Bylaws...  Two years since the old forums went offline suddenly and I managed to recover them from a routine database backup...

ODUG has had a rich history spanning 30+ years... but it's future is currently a blank canvas.  So, with the new year, I ask the question to the community...

What do the Users want to happen to their User's Group?  I'm open to any and all input and feedback, good, bad, and/or ugly.

-JD.

[tomondemand]

There are little to no recourses available when trying to learn CMOD and am very thankful that this forum existed to answer my questions. For that reason, it would be great if it would continue. Of course, it needs to be monitored by those capable of answering questions.

[geoffwilde]

I have come to the site looking for similar experiences I have, but it is not frequent. I have not played with chatgpt or copiot to see how accurate those are in assessing and resolving questions.

I know every sort of conference and travel suffered a lot with budget constraints. I miss the days of what ODUG started out as but nothing good lasts forever. I know the user group, if it continues, will not be what it once was. I'm not even sure how many of those I met thru the user group are still with ODUG. I would continue to use the forum if it stays around.

[Justin Derrick]

Broadly speaking, I advise *against* using AI/LLM output for anything important.  I've had a few occasions where people have written to me, letting me know that machine generated summaries (of information clearly found on the Forums or Wiki) were not accurate.  I informed them to use the source itself and not summaries, because I can't stop LLMs from generating garbage output.

I will *also* say that many, many folks have moved on -- I haven't counted the full total yet, but I'm going to estimate I have nearly 100 eMail bounces waiting for me to deal with.

EDIT:  About 10% of eMails were bounces, or recipients asked to be removed from the Forums, we've got a little over 800 users, down from a high of around 1100.

-JD.

[Ed_Arnold]

At a minimum I'd like to see this website continue.

I like the ability to publish items that I think are of interest to the CMOD community.

Ed Arnold

[Ed_Arnold]

At the moment there's only one supported level of CMOD and it's quite mature.

When CMOD V.Next comes out I suspect activity will pick up as people start to migrate to the new version.

Ed Arnold

[teera_aoo]

This forum is still a very important source of information. I've tried asking AI about IBM CMOD or other IBM products,
but the answers are often just guesses because the AI doesn't know the exact product details (and it also takes time to remove sensitive information).

I understand that running seminars requires a lot of resources, so focusing on Q&A discussions in the forum makes sense.

I also agree that when the next CMOD version is released, more people will likely join this community.

One issue I've noticed is that the website sometimes loads very slowly. Not sure if this is only happening in my region or if others see the same thing.

Cheers,
TW.

[JeanineJ]

It's decent reference source when one can't get direct answers from IBM or when IBM says sorry that's a Lab Services issue/problem/function. Like last week when I needed to interrogate a CMOD appgroup for documents greater than 5MB for a project. I eventually figured out how to do it.

[johnkyle68]

I would like to see this website continue. Although, I do not post much on the site, I have found a lot of answers to issues I have faced over the years on the site.

John Kyle

[corjander]

I am in a similar position as others in this thread. While I do not contribute much myself, I have been able to solve many issues or at least get some relevant details about some questions/concerns thanks to this forum. AI searches on OnDemand topics have been really horrible for me as well.

I have really appreciated this forum and would love to see it continue.

[plam]

I find ODUG to be a helpful resource. There is information here that you can't find elsewhere/AI. I don't post, but I come here looking for information and would certainly like to see it continue. Thanks.