Letter from the President - 2012 January
Happy New Year!
If that didn’t get you excited about 2012 and all that it has in store for you, then I guess I just have to go into the details! AUGI is poised to do some pretty cool things this year and all of it is member driven and guided by the AUGI Board of Directors.
So just who are the AUGI Board of Directors? Simple, they are you. Or at least pretty much just like you. We recently held the elections for the 2012-2014 (three-year) terms but before I go into detail on that let me take a moment to congratulate and thank the departing directors. Exiting after six years on the AUGI Board, Bill Adams, our intrepid man from down under (Australia) was very instrumental in our transition to self-governance and often provided valued points of view on our various programs. He has served his time and is hoping to contribute in other ways.
Exiting after two years on the Board, Donnie Gladfelter contributed greatly to organizational planning. We grew to trust his targeted insight—to the point that if Donnie liked something, we knew it was a good idea. We will try to keep Donnie involved in our social media channel development and we may even see him back on the Board some day.
Lastly, I, David Harrington, have left the Board. I had a two-year term and not only wanted to see more members step up and serve, but also am working to have the President cede more control to the Board of Directors. The Board has asked that I continue to serve as President for 2012, so I certainly am not going away just yet. The reality now is that I have no vote in decisions and will have to make my case to one more director instead. I can handle that.
With those empty seats come new directors! We have Scott Ebert, Tommy Holder, and Desiree (Ratley) Mackey. Desiree is also currently serving as Treasurer. The AUGI Board will be holding its first meeting in mid-January and I have high hopes for a very productive year. We have a lot planned to do, let’s run it down.
AUGIWORLD: We are working to put AUGIWORLD magazine back in paper print! Initially it will be small distribution, only a few hundred. But as members opt to pay dues, this will increase. See next point:
AUGI Dues: Don’t worry, the free AUGI membership is not going away. Rather we will be adding a Professional AUGI Membership option and one of the additional benefits of that membership plan will be AUGIWORLD delivered in print.
AUGI.com: We will be adjusting some of the top bar navigation and restructuring some of the hierarchy to ease traffic flow on the website. We have some really great things on the website and want to improve their exposure.
AUGI Forums: For the forums we want to upgrade to v4 of vBulletin forum software, permitting mobile access, and do some minor hierarchy adjustments.
AUGI Events: The CAD Camps will be taking a break in 2012, but we will be looking at other events we can attend to spread exposure about AUGI and our programs.
AUGI Wish List: The new Wish List system is entering the last phase of development. We will be implementing voting year-long. This will improve our ability to get the best ideas to Autodesk when they are needed during the product design cycle.
AUGI HotNews: Our email newsletter recently underwent a redesign, but there are a few tweaks left to make. We will also continue to look for opportunities to develop non-English newsletters and perhaps industry- or product-focused newsletters as well.
AUGI Communities: In our view, a community is any subset of AUGI membership. It could be language based, product based, location based, or even industry based. We are refining our definition to enable alignment with various groups of members, both internal just as language and product, and external like location and industry.
AUGI Education: We recently announced Global e-Training as our Official Training Partner. This will be providing training opportunities to all members and even more as a paid member. Through this partnership we can finally focus on the true peer-to-peer educational methods that only AUGI can do.
This isn’t the entire list of efforts; there are other things left to do. Needless to say, we could use your help. Be it writing, supporting, administrating, developing, creating, and just helping, find your place and get involved. You will find the work very rewarding and only the sky is the limit in what you can accomplish. What are you waiting for? Another year to go by?
Take care,
David Harrington
