Ron Higgins, the IBM Publications representative to SHARE in the 70s and 80s, was very receptive of suggestions, and came to project meetings soliciting opinions to make Pubs better. REVISION: "CICS PUBS value my SHAREd opinion" was from the CICS Publications team in Hursley - not from Ron Higgins. I was the Publications Planner at the time, and I accompanied one of the CICS Development managers, Peter Titman, to SHARE 60, in San Francisco. Our aim was to discover how the CICS Information was accepted by the real users of our product. I had just written the first ever Release Guide, and we had started to task-orient our information. So we created a survey to find out more about use of our information. I decided to build the survey around a set of questionnaires and - being young and naïve - expected to interview a hundred or two people in a week to get a good sample. Peter and I carried mountains of paper in our luggage, but threw most of it into bins after a day or two. In the event, we achieved about 30 interviews during the week, but only by pressure salesmanship. Back in Hursley, my manager, Doug Braund, seemed quite disappointed at the amount of feedback. But he understood the challenge later in the year, after repeating the exercise with me at GUIDE 56 in Chicago. The badge came about because I spoke to our SHARE rep, Andy Krasun, before SHARE 60, about how to attract responses to our questionnaire. He recommended creating a button. When the buttons arrived Andy was not very complimentary; he thought they were a bit lame. I didn't realise what he meant until I saw some of the other works of art on display. Our button just wasn't very funny, but it did say what we were about, so I got over it. SHARE 60 was my first trip to SHARE, my first to California, and my first to the USA. I've since been to multiple SHAREs and GUIDEs across America, and loved every one. It's a bit of a cliché to say this, but like every great enterprise, it is all about the people you meet. SHARE and GUIDE were always about fantastic, enthusiastic, professional, fun people. Jim Geraghty.
