On March 13, 2024 PACS President, Don Arrowsmith sent a big announcement out to all PACS members.
It read:
The PACS board unanimously approved a motion to make all future regular meetings virtual. The hope was that returning to Giant would return our attendance to pre-covid levels. That didn’t happen; The average for our September, October, and November meetings were at or below the virtual meeting totals. Virtual meetings have many advantages – no travel problems, no weather worries, no fretting about germs, lower costs for PACS, comforts of your own home, retain members who move away, recruit members from anywhere, and others. We may possibly schedule some in-person gatherings in the future, like a summer picnic, holiday party, or a 50th anniversary celebration.
Another motion that was adopted was to not renew our liability insurance. The cost of that took the total dues for almost 60 members.
This is a rather substantial change in PACS operations. We had planned to return to in-person meeting with our March 2024 meeting, but the current attendance climate has caused the board to rethink things.
As a board member, and SIG leader, I was disappointed that we had to go this route, but I did vote in the affirmative for the motions.
The WordPress SIG, which I lead, has seen its attendance drop off over the course of the pandemic. My hope was that participation would pick up when we did go back to in-person meetings at the beginning of the PACS 2023-2024 year. Alas, it did not happen.
This new method of operating will enable us to attract online participation from all over – travel distances no longer limit us to the Philly surrounding areas.
Here’s to continuing PACS learning opportunities and for users helping users.
Note:
The featured image of this post was generated using Copilot (preview) from Microsoft Windows 11. The prompt used was:
Create a graphic drawn in the style of Mad Max magazine of a street sign arrow with the words ONLINE ONLY pointing upward in a 45 degree angle. The sign should be on a pole with a lot of clouds in the background.
After the 1st iteration, I updated the prompt by adding:
Add some text that says ‘Welcome to the future’.
Not perfect, but I liked it. Even with the typos 🙂
