>From page 2 of Melinda's paper (http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/25paper.pdf)
With VM's amazing growth, the VM Group in SHARE had always had a problem making newcomers feel at home, simply because they always outnumbered the oldtimers. In 1983, the Group was going through yet another attempt to overcome this problem, and it was decided that at SHARE 60 we would hand out little square yellow stickers to newcomers to the VM Group and little square blue stickers to oldtimers, with the idea that if they all put the stickers on their badges, the oldtimers could identify the newcomers and help make them feel at home. The problem with that, of course, was that nobody could remember which sticker was which, so it didn't work out at all. A couple of days into that week, however, Carol Jobusch bought a few hundred teddy bear stickers, with the idea of affixing them to the cuddlier of the oldtimers so that the newcomers would know that here was a warm cuddly person who ran the warm cuddly system and who could be counted on to be friendly if approached. Within hours, the teddy bear had become the de facto symbol for VM, and everybody in the VM Group, old or new, cuddly or prickly, was wearing a teddy bear on his badge. (The Jobusches subsequently got a 50-KB roll of stickers, to keep SHARE well supplied.)
