[UK-TUG] Successor organisations for the UK TeX Users Group

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

I thank Jay, Nicola and Joseph for sharing their experience and wishes. I'd
like to follow that with a different approach.

"Make the best of what there is." One of the best pieces of advice I've
been given, and one of the hardest. I regret and apologise for when my
optimism has been insufficiently balanced by realism. But I do not
apologise for my optimism.

By my reckoning there are between 10,000 and 100,000 users of TeX in the
UK. (This might include people who mainly use LaTeX+MathJax on web pages.)
The committee supporters of dissolution wrote that UK-TUG "is almost
entirely disconnected from the UK’s TeX community.

Optimism says we can do much better than that. Realism says you can get
there from here. We may be more connected than we realise.

I'm one of over 3,000 members of the London Math Society (LMS). I know of
at least one other member of the LMS in UK-TUG. I expect the LMS to have
over 2,000 TeX users in the UK.

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has over 50,000 members, one of whom
is Joseph Wright. Again, perhaps there are other members. Perhaps the RSC
has 5,000 TeX users.

The Institute of Physics (IoP) has over 23,000 members. Perhaps 5,000 TeX
users. Is anyone here a member of the IoP?

And on a smaller scale, Keiran Harcombe volunteered that he's secretary of
the British Computing Society branch in Bristol and Bath (around 250
members). Nationally, the BCS has 60,000 members.

Although we can't get there from here, mighty oaks out of acorns grow. An
optimist might see opportunities arising from the dissolution of UK-TUG.

wishing you happy TeXing

Jonathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/uktug-announce/attachments/20211107/cc16d464/attachment.html>