Top Reasons Why IT Staff Should Attend Conferences!

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Top Reasons Why IT Staff Should Attend Conferences!

7/16/2003

By Terry Calhoun

Sometimes you have to travel away from home to learn things about home. But travel away from home is threatened right now by the fiscal crisis with which our institutions are coping. (And there's evidence that the crisis may actually be a new way of functioning and will never end.) What d'es this mean for your travel budget? Or are you at an institution where travel has been completely banned, and you have no budget at all? Who's getting to travel anyway? We think it's important, even in this virtual age, for IT staff to experience face-to-face professional development and networking.

So, we've queried some folks on the discussion lists for the American Society of Association Executives and the University Web Developers (UWEBD) and have come up with a list of points you can use to keep or increase your budget for travel and other expenses for IT staff development.

I'm lucky. Not only do I work for an association that inherently understands the value of conferences and workshops—because that's part of what it d'es—but my boss also wisely believes in special development support for IT staff. She understands that creative, innovative, connected IT staff can provide productivity boosts that are real, but sometimes hard to articulate.

I'm also lucky because I quite recently experienced one of those strange connections where I can practically demonstrate that traveling away from home actually paid off when I found out about something I had not been able to learn about at home—even though it was right next door!

We've been looking for virtual working group software for our committees, task forces, and staff working groups. Did I mention that it had to be inexpensive? We had tried Yahoo! Groups, but the advertising drove us and our volunteers crazy. One day last winter, I decided I would go to the National Learning Information Infrastructure conference in New Orleans, partly for my own professional development and partly because we were distributing a complimentary copy of our book, Transforming e-Knowledge, to attendees.

The first thing I saw on the first day was a signup sheet to join some Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP); so I did. Later that morning, in a session (I was paying attention!) I was checking e-mail and saw that I had been added to the membership of a VCoP. So I went to the virtual site and was impressed. WorkTools (http://worktools.si.umich.edu/) was almost exactly what we had been looking for.

When I took a closer look at the domain address I realized that this software tool was hosted at the University of Michigan (UM)—which is where I am! So I excitedly e-mailed the Webmaster, asking to be told more about it. Later, in the next session, I received an e-mail from a very nice young woman staffer from UM who said she thought that she was in the meeting room right across the hall from me, and suggested that we meet later during a break.

We did. She was very helpful. Now I manage or am a member of about 30 virtual working groups. Did I mention that we're not being charged a fee to use this resource? And that we are also connected now with the development team that is building the next, even more sophisticated version? Try to put a dollar amount on that!