I apologize for sending this to both the users and discuss lists even though I am aware that cross-posting is a violation of list etiquette. If there is further discussion, please direct it to the discuss list. My reason for raising the topic in both forums is to reach readers quickly in North America who might only read one and not the other, and who might be in Portland this week for OSCON. For those unaware of it, a wiki page was started at OOo a few months ago to provide information on events and activities involving OOo in the USA. The public communications surrounding this set-up and two major proposals, i.e. a booth at the American Library Association convention(quite a large affair with approx 20,000 attendees) in DC and a subsequent organizational meeting in New York City occurred mainly on the Marketing Project-dev mailing list. As far as anyone outside of the people directly involved could tell, both projects were moving ahead smoothly. In fact, however, one of the principals organizing our ALA presence canceled, apparently on his own initiative, the entire operation. As to the second, though supposedly taking place July 1, there has been so far no report on either the wiki or mailing lists as to not only any topics discussed but even whether the event took place. We seem to have, as the warden famously said, “a failure to communicate.” If we would like to have an active community here in the US, I doubt trying to run it through a marketing mailing list will be effective. While at the OooCon in Orvieto last fall, it became clear to me that central to the structure of “community” involvement were the NLC's. The groups that formed to translate/localize the program developed into the providers of most of the QA volunteers checking issues, writing FAQ's etc. Unfortunately(?) for us, we don't have this potentially unifying task to rally around; but some sort of UserGroup should be feasible-though OOoUG does have some strange phonetic implications-and as far as we're concerned, a user-centric rather than developer-driven base might be more appealing. Is there enough interest to consider a 501(c)(3)? Should we see if Oracle wants to do something? Anyone at OSCON who wants to get together? Douglas Bash