Our History

1999: Complete Budget Control

Ten years after AUGI was formed, the organization managed to gain its budgetary independence through the help of Autodesk and the Board of Directors. Still financially supported by Autodesk, Third-Party Developers, and by membership dues, the Board of Directors worked with Autodesk's legal department this year to set up AUGI as a financially independent organization truly in control of its budget. This enabled the organization to tightly control its expenses, allocate funds ahead of time for programs such as the AUGI Training Program (for the first year ever it compensated its teachers and staff), the Annual Productivity CDROM, the quarterly published newsletter WorldView, the website expenses and necessary software to run it, and employ some of its volunteers for the heavier workloads such as managing the website and handling shipping for membership tangibles.

Of incredible note this term what the fact that AUGI introduced a Free Web-Level Membership to the planet so that anyone (regardless of where they lived or who they worked for or what kind of budget they had) could benefit from AUGI's most popular resources and programs, thus finally conquering AUGI's last major international hurdle: differing economies of scale for its international members. The organization also redesigned its website for the first time in 3 years. A new 'entrance' to the website made joining the organization easier, and several online databases were developed for maintaining the membership, the AUGI Technical Guilds and Mailing Lists, the official Local User Group directory, and the Career Corner (resumes, job opportunities and promotions for members) and surveys.

The following officers were elected for the 2000 term:

President: Emmanuel Garcia / Garcia & Garcia
Vice-President: David Harrington / Walter P. Moore and Associates
Secretary: John Gibb / CFI
Treasurer: Donnia Tabor-Hanson / Designer's Alliance
AEC IG Chair: Phillip Shivel / MBAJ Architects
Mechanical IG Chair: David Kingsley / CAD TV Corp.
Programming IG Chair: John Gibb / CFI
Multimedia SIG Chair: Craig Reed / CMT Inc.
GIS IG Chair: Scott McFarlane / Woolpert
Education & Training IG Chair: Yoshi Honda / Pacific CADD Services, Inc.
Local User Group Representative: dave espinosa-aguilar / Toxic Frog Multimedia
Senior Autodesk Rep: Lynn Allen / Autodesk
User Group Services: Rebecca Bell / Autodesk