As 2018 comes to a close, I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on all of the wonderful things that the HEUG and our members were able to accomplish and to acknowledge the hard work that our members do every day to enable the organization to not only exist, but to thrive!
Salt Lake City, USA to Brisbane, Australia and everywhere in between!
2018 saw successful conferences that started with our global Alliance Conference held in Salt Lake City, Utah for the first time ever and launched our regional conferences across the U.S. and into our Asia Alliance conference held in Hong Kong with strong attendance and engagement, and then over to Southern Africa (held in Bloemfontein, SA at the beautiful campus of the University of the Free State) Latin America (brought back to Bogota, Columbia and hosted at the amazing Pontificia Universidad Javeriana). The next global conference was EMEA held in Belgium for the first time ever in October of 2018, and the feedback from participants and Oracle engagement were just amazing. Finally, November saw a return to Brisbane, Australia for another strong ADU Conference at that spectacular facility and our first CHEUG Alliance Conference hosted graciously by the remarkable MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta!
All of these conferences would not have been possible if not for the remarkable HEUG members that helped organize and deliver the events. From the pre-work of identifying the venue and logistics, to following through on identifying and coordinating the sessions as well as finding vendor sponsors to help keep the registration fees low, all of these conferences were only able to happen because of the hard work and dedication of volunteer members like yourselves!
As we move into 2019, I hope we can find more volunteers to meet these challenges. We want to continue to evolve our events to meet the needs of our membership, but we can NOT do that unless you step up and step forward to assist us and make your voices heard. We are a volunteer organization that is completely dependent upon our members, We will continue to be successful moving forward because we have such talented and committed members to our goals.
Here is to everyone being able to have a wonderful and restful new years with their colleagues, friends and loved ones, and looking forward to working with all of you to develop and deliver our future!
CHEERS!
Jason