The Club Macintosh de Québec is a Mac-only user group located in the region of Quebec City, 120 miles east of Montreal, in the province of Québec. Founded early in 1985, the CMQ is now the largest user group in Canada, and the largest french-speaking one in the world.
To please its more than 2200 members (and counting!), the CMQ has to offer, like all major user groups, a lot of activities and services. Here’s a sampling of what the CMQ offers to its members: monthly meetings; weekly training sessions; weekly Q&A sessions; monthly SIGs in the areas of programming, HyperCard, business, graphic arts; special Saturday mornings for kids; monthly one-day seminars on a software product; monthly beginner’s nights, monthly expert’s nights; ; complete training; a bi-monthly newsletter; a monthly bulletin; a thirteen-line FirstClass BBS at 28800 bps; a nice collection of public domain sofware; special pricing for members at dealers; a nice office; the Carrefour Macintosh; a presentation room seating between 2 and 80; and of course, a smile on every face you see at meetings!
The members come from everywhere and their age range from 7 to 84 years old. Everybody says that the dynamism is the greatest strength of the group and it is very important for the administrators to keep it that way.
The Club Macintosh de Québec is also the proud “godfather” of smaller groups all over the province of Québec. Being the largest user group in Canada and having a good structure in place sure helps us help these more modest groups in offering better services.
Christian Gingras
Christian Gingras, 28 years old, is the president of the Club Macintosh de Québec for the fourth year in a row (it is its sixth year on the board of directors). Being a member of the CMQ since 1985, he has always loved his Mac and has every issue of MacUser, Macworld, Macazine, and all the recent issues of MacWEEK in his personal library. He began to work for the group as the moderator for the HyperCard forum on the BBS, then taking charge of the special interest group for HyperCard. His volunteer work led him to sell disks and manage the public domain library, and he still does it with a lot of enthusiasm. As vice-president, he began to take the CMQ outside of Quebec, and his desire is now to make the CMQ the absolute best user group in the world! His motivation: reach the Mac users who are alone in their basement, without knowing about public domain software, about the latest versions of system software, and about all the stuff that makes the Mac what it is...
