I'd never been to one of these before. They have one at each SHARE, but somehow I have always managed to have a session conflict. I came to this one thinking that it was going to be pretty dry, but rationalized that it would probably be good for me -- sort of like going to school.

Actually it turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would. Each of the SHARE officers gave about a five minute spiel on whatever seemed pertinent to the officer's station, and then the meeting was turned over to an open microphone where attendees could take pot shots.

First business was the formal announcement of election results.

Dave Thiewlis presented the "strategic concerns" of SHARE; each year the membership is polled to see what the current hot buttons are. Dave reported last year's hot buttons vs. those of this year. SHARE management uses these numbers to adjust session mixes, responses to standards committees and so on.

Gary Ainsworth reported on SHARE's standards committee efforts. SHARE is a member of a number of international standards committees; the three standards efforts that we are most concerned with at this time are the Unicode, POSIX and X.3-OSI committees. Gary reported that a single code character set standard had been approved. (Expect to see a two-byte character set in your future sometime in the next few years.)

Lois Hoyer (the sacrificial lamb in this year's race for President) said that the SHARE finances still look pretty good, even considering that attendance has fallen off in the last year or so.

Chester Hood talked about the technical program, which is SHARE's bread and butter. There was great interest at this SHARE on "interoperability", mixing and matching systems of different vendors. Chester feels that this will fuel increasing interest in systems management. Interest in graphical user interfaces remains high, and the interim meeting in Tampa will include an update of the successful "Future Click" sessions.

Chester mournfully reported that cancelled sessions are up, as are sessions provided by IBM, vendors and other visitors. He says that SHARE management is taking stock of this, and considering ways to increase presentations by SHARE members.

Ann Caluori (Director of Meeting Arrangements, and Esprit de Corps pianist) gave the final report. One of the problems we've had with SHARE sessions over the past couple of years is that no one can seem to agree on the proper session length. 90 minutes is too long for many topics, but an hour seems too short for others. She said that a compromise has been struck, where sessions normally last an hour, but that sessions #3 and #6 may optionally go longer.

We had a spirited discussion about the "VTAM Band". A group of VTAM developers came to SHARE with their musical instruments and played several nights at SCIDS. (Eleven people on stage doing drums, horns, guitars and vocals; I listened to them run through a set of old CTA hits and thought they were pretty good. Heck, people were dancing.) The problem with them is that they were also pretty loud. When the band was playing, you couldn't talk to anybody, and that's the main reason you go to SCIDS. I think we ended up agreeing that the VTAM Band was welcome to return, but that we had to find some way to segregate the quiet SCIDS crowd from the music -- maybe put them into an adjoining ballroom.

We also poked some fun at the "situation at the Hilton" (where Jack the Rapper was leaving about the same time we got there). Ann says she'll know enough to check for this sort of thing the next time she makes arrangements.