
The Riga Report


From: Harry Bush - Dateline: 5 May 1994 - Riga, Latvia


There was a small but IMHO significant event in Riga, Latvia: a meeting
organized by IBM Representative Office in Latvia.  Team OS/2 members and
other people from OS/2 community were invited to discuss how to improve
interaction and which OS/2 related matters are of greatest interest for
OS/2 users and application developers there.

The meeting was organized by Location Manager Martin Nigals and Operating
Systems Consultant Juris Uzulans.  It was announced also on Latvian
Fidonet.  Some 20 attendants, all quite qualified people already using
OS/2 - network managers, data analysts, software developers (several
EMEA DAP participants), students etc.  discussed with IBMers lots of
possible ways on how to develop closer contacts with IBM structures,
improve information flows and help OS/2 in our area.  Seems to me Martin
will have several serious items to describe in his report to the company.

Certainly it was not an advertisizing meeting because people there
were experienced in OS/2 and related stuff.  I would better call
it User Group meeting number zero ,  because the decision was taken
by attendees to form OS/2 User Group in Latvia as well as continue
such meetings on a regular basis.

The best thing was that people met and had fun speaking about things they
are interested in.  From the other side IBM people found out what are
preferred directions of greatest interest,  the #1 being LAN technology
in OS/2 and mixed OS/2-Novell-TCP/IP environments.  Next meeting will be
devoted to LAN things and one of Repr. Office specialists will be avail-
able there for torturing with nasty questions.


After end of event friendly talks continued in lobby and even outside the
building.  BTW some snapshots were taken - one of them hopefully will show
a bunch of Latvian Team OS/2 members dressed in T-shirts  (occasionally
bought by one of teamers in Sweden :-)

So it was a nice meeting.  Thanks IBM (well my guess is that the initiative
was mostly coming from local IBMers :-)

