Ideas for attracting new members to (Sydney and other) LabVIEW user groups

[Peter_B]

This thread is spawned from here where I was guilty of hijacking the original thread.

I am interested in discussing ideas for attracting new members to (Sydney and other) LabVIEW user groups.  Here are a few ideas from me

1. Ask NI to be more pro-active in promoting and funding the group
2. Invite a work colleague
3. Encourage NI to promote LabVIEW Everywhere

To continue discussions on point 3 , if you were in charge of NI, how would you promote LabVIEW's use in places other than it is used now ?

[Mihai]

I'm not entirely comfortable with point 1. This is and must remain the user's group, not NI's. They have plenty of other avenues to promote their wares.

I may be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge LabVIEW is (or at least was at some stage) popular in Italy because in the early days the local agent handed out free copies to Ferrari. I suppose something similar, but on a different scale needs to happen now. LabVIEW is freely accessible to engineering students (at least in Sydney) but not to computer science students. Someone needs to go out there and tell them that this is the bee's knees. And that assertion needs to be backed up by some large applications not related to NI or other's hardware, possibly developed without the hope for a profit. On a more specific note, I would like to see (even for us, existing die-hard fans) more support in integrating .NET in our applications, which for the time being is a bit of a black art.

But of course all of these can only happen if NI truly wants everyone to be using LabVIEW everywhere. That I am not sure of.

[Peter_B]

Fair enough on point 1.  NI do have so many other avenues and if they started funding a User Group they might want to control the content .

Free copies of LabVIEW.  That's an interesting idea,   Instead of NI thinking "look at the money we are losing by giving LabVIEW away", perhaps instead they should think "look at all this extra interest people have in using our hardware because they trust and like to use LabVIEW to solve other problems in their lives."

If enough people are using LabVIEW, and assuming they have good experiences with it, then NI's H/W sales will increase due to the Halo Effect.

[hlamoe2003]

I think we can attract the students and lecturers from National Instruments Autonomous Robotics Competition (NI ARC)  to invite our meeting. By doing that they would see how labVIEW has been used in real application in industry with NI hardware.

[crelf]

Peter_B wrote:

NI do have so many other avenues and if they started funding a User Group they might want to control the content .

I think that's unlikely. I also think that having NI fund it in a large way is also unlikely. I belong to a number of user groups where NI provides food - I think that's about as much as you'd be able to expect. And no, NI doesn't try to control the content of those meetings

[crelf]

hlamoe2003 wrote:

I think we can attract the students and lecturers from National Instruments Autonomous Robotics Competition (NI ARC)  to invite our meeting. By doing that they would see how labVIEW has been used in real application in industry with NI hardware.

Great idea! I wonder if they have opportunites for guest speakers?

[Mihai]

In theory we should get a good harvest while approaching NI ARC team members. But we shouldn't take it for granted that they are already hooked up on LabVIEW. A couple of years ago I met a member of the Macquarie University team, on the eve of his departure for the finals in the USA. Sure enough, their machine was driven by a cRIO. But their application was written in C# because they thought LabVIEW was something amateurs do, so it was below them.

I'm telling you, we have a lot of work to do, and NI is not helping.