Do you know who runs the ODTUG EPM Community?

Probably not, but you should

Have you ever wondered who makes the ODTUG EPM Community initiatives come off?  I don’t mean Kscope (there’s a Conference Committee for that) but instead the webinars, the Kscope EPM Monday Night EPM event, the Technical Journal articles, the regional meetups, and the quarterly newsletter?

In large part, you do Oh Gentle reader do when you present a webinar, or have fun on Monday night, or write a whitepaper, or help out with the newsletter, or attend a meetup.  But who organizes those initiatives?  Why do they even exist?

‘Cos

These initiatives exist, and engage you, and succeed because of volunteers.  Volunteers who are just like you or yr. obt. svt. only crazier more dedicated.  They’re ODUTG volunteers that serve everyone in the EPM community within and without ODTUG.  That’s right – ODTUG is the foundation of these enterprises but they serve all EPM practitioners everywhere.  It sounds kind of awesome and it is.

They (and yes, I’m going to get to them in a moment so please bear with me) recruit webinar speakers (hey, if you’re interested in presenting an ODTUG webinar, sign up here), organize the Monday Night Kscope event, recruit Technical Journal writers, appleseed EPM meetups, and recruit writers, write articles themselves, and edit the quarterly newsletter.  None of this happens by magic and all of it happens for “free” to your benefit.  Have you noticed how these activities have picked up over the last year?  That’s not a happy accident but instead the outcome of a group of talented and hardworking individuals.

We happy few

This is the first in a series of posts on ODTUG’s EPM community and in future posts I’ll highlight each of the volunteers, but for this first go round I shall leave the panegyrics to a simple listing of the volunteers and their roles and responsibilities.  As promised, more detail will follow.

• Gary Crisci, EPM community lead emeritus*
• Gary Adashek, EPM community lead
• Jennifer Anderson, social media (Twitter, Technical Journal, webinars, newsletter, blogs) lead
• Janice D’Aloia, meetups lead and newsletter editor
• Chris Rothermel, social media
• Courtney Foster, Kscope Monday Night Madness
• Erin Davis, YCC coordinator

*A note and a happy one about GaryC (two Gary’s overwhelm my limited mind so I refer to them as GaryC and GaryA, probably to their intense annoyance):  GaryC is a recently elected ODTUG board member and as the EPM community is run by EPM community members, not the Board of Directors, he had to find a replacement.  I’m glad to note that GaryC has a namesake colleague GaryA just as interested in the EPM community.  Also, the almost-the-same names keeps my level of naming confusion to a minimum.  Sort of.

What about yr. obt. svt.?

I’m very happy to report that I am entering my last year on the board (not actually happy about that) and thus my last year as the EPM community liaison to the BoD (Hmm, not happy about that either but such are term limits.  That’s the way she goes.).  What does that title mean?  While I would love to tell you that it means I expend an enormous amount of hard work, that the success of these initiatives are due to my sterling efforts, etc. the role really is only keeping an eye on what the EPM community does and bringing any requests for funding or direction to the attention of the BoD.  It’s an easy billet.

More coming

As noted, you’ll see more on the EPM community, what we’re doing, and how you can contribute as well as benefit from these volunteers’ hard work.

Be seeing you.