This is a wonderful time for all of us to be involved with the HEUG. It has become a cliche to just talk about our new global community, but it is quite another to watch it function up close. Consider the past month alone. In October, the UK Senior User Group met in Cambridge and invited a couple of HEUG board members to attend. At the very same time in Brussels, the leaders of the EMEA Oracle User Community were meeting and invited the current HEUG EMEA representative to participate. Just two weeks later back in the US, a couple of us attended a one-day planning meeting for a regional conference at Duke University. In November, several of us attended our first HEUG EMEA event in Amsterdam, co-located with the now-annual Dutch Education User Group conference. Our colleagues from South Africa were not able to join us as they had just finished up the higher education track at the South African Oracle User Group conference. As most of us headed back to our day jobs, a fresh group of board members headed down to Alliance Down Under, the annual HEUG event held by our members in Australia and New Zealand. From there, some went on to attend the inaugural higher education special interest group meeting in Singapore. While they were there, a couple of us attended a conference call with an emerging community leader in Brazil. What a month.
Here are the numbers. Over 700 individual HEUG members from over 100 HEUG member institutions attending over 50 sessions offered at 7 events on 6 continents in 4 weeks with 1 mission: to be the voice of the global higher education and research industry, to educate our members, and to advocate on their behalf. Why?
Next week the HEUG board of directors will hold its annual meeting at Oracle Headquarters. This event is the cornerstone of our advocacy mission. This is our opportunity to discuss with Oracle executives what is on the minds of our membership. What is working well, what isn't, what the future of the industry looks like, what the pain points are, what we are looking for in the next generations of applications and technology. How do we know? This year more than any other in the past, we will be able to go into that meeting and articulate the needs of our member institutions. We will be able to do that because we have been there. We have talked face to face with you, our members -- at your institutions -- all over the world.