Our History

2010: Celebrating Twenty Years

AUGI was started back in 1990 and completed the 20th year of assisting users who want to connect to other users.  We have expanded from a small group of scattered participants to almost 200,000 international members.  Over those twenty years we moved from NAAUG to AUGI and embraced new technologies to invigorate the sharing of knowledge between members.  

AUGI celebrated its twentieth year with a slew of benefit opportunities.  Members have always been our focus and that continued as demonstrated through new rollouts and initiatives.

In order to better progress with these efforts, the Board of Directors expanded to ten members.  This provided additional support and assisted in planning for the future.  The expanded Board gives us more input and more hands on efforts and oversight for the areas of AUGI. Each area reflects a process, program or initiative of the organization.  We discussed what each area needed and who would oversee each one. 

We expanded the Wish Lists to cover 6 products by adding various flavors of Revit to the mix.  We began researching the expansion of this process and hope to have some additional Wish Lists in 2011. 

We expanded our reach with social media offerings that included a Facebook page, Twitter accounts and a LinkedIn group.  Website visits were up by 22% over 2009. 

Our publications continued to move forward with AUGIWORLD and AUGI | AEC Edge.  Content expanded in both magazines, and we even provided content for other publications by Extension Media in the area of Media and Entertainment.

We connected up with Drop.io to provide a new resource for our members as they seek ways of sharing files with each other.  At the end of the year Drop.io was acquired by Facebook and is no longer available.  We look forward to seeing what Facebook might be doing with this added functionality in the future.

AUGI CAD Camps have historically been valuable events for our membership and others in the design community. With continued urging from our members, we embarked on the 2010 Spring CAD Camps season. However, the year’s reactivation of AUGI CAD Camps met with mixed results. While our members that attended the spring Camps rated them "excellent" and found the content to be very useful, we struggled with lower than expected attendance and sponsor support. Due to the troubles with attendance at AUGI CAD Camps, the year did not end on a profitable note.  It was a mixed bag of some very successful locations, but many Camps were cancelled due to poor registration. 

The large part of our efforts in the second half of the year went into the upgrading of the AUGI website. The site was inaugurated at Autodesk University with expanded content in publications and more.  We worked with a web design firm named Encaffeinated. Their team of web developers provided design and technology direction so that the end result is now based on a new CMS called Expression Engine. This CMS will allow easier content modifications and site enhancements.

The transition was not without troubles as the vBulletin Forum data was not included with the initial launch, causing many to be concerned about the negative impact this might have going forward.  The Board continued to seek the archival Forum data and worked out a process for restoration and defined a process by the end of the year.  We apologize for the short term negative impact that this had on our members and the worldwide Autodesk product users.  As the year ended the board and Forum moderators worked to restore the old data.

At year’s end, membership stood at 195,000.

The following served on the board for 2010:
President: Mark W. Kiker
SR Vice President:  David Harrington
Vice President: John Morgan
Secretary:  Bill Adams
Treasurer:  Paul Kirill
Board Member:  Donnie Gladfelter
Board Member:  Peter Jamtgaard
Board Member:  Ken Leary
Board Member:  Dario Passariello
Board Member:  Jane Smith