Site Visit. The executive committee held our Site Visit and Winter Meeting during the week of March 8th (before March 20th, so it was still Winter!). It was the week after Mardi Gras, so the beads were still in the trees and our contacts were happy to talk about the festivities! A total of 6 from our 11 member team were able to travel to the Mobile site. The remaining 5 of us stayed home for various reasons and called in to the full EC meetings on Friday and Saturday. During the site visit, we were able to talk with representatives of a number of local sites, our charity (Mobile Baykeeper), the venue and caterer for our Monday Night Event, our keynote speaker, and our hotel. It was a very productive visit and we are still working through all of our notes and action items!
Registration. Registration is being tested! Our Registrar has set up the system and we are currently in our second round of testing. Registration will open on April 23rd, so look out for the announcement and check the website!
Social Media. This year, our social media team is going to be integral to pushing out announcements and information about the different features and dates related to the conference. I encourage you to follow our individual accounts (in addition to this blog!) to make sure you are getting any announcements and updates hot off the press.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3685330/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SouthEastSASUG/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/sesug1
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/southeastsasusersgroup/
- Website: https://sesug.org/SESUG2022/index.php
Monday Night Event. Our venue, caterer, and transportation have all been chosen! Now we are just down to deposits and contracts.
Volunteer & Games. Our volunteer coordinators and Game Masters had their first meeting last week! The line-up for volunteering and networking activities looks very engaging and fun, so if you have any interest in getting involved, please reach out to volunteers@sesug.org!
Mobile App. During the Winter Meeting we discussed many possibilities for a mobile app platform. Over the last few weeks we have reached out to several companies and toured/demoed multiple apps. We want to make sure we select the best one for our attendees that would maximize both the educational and networking aspects of our conference. We have a lot of great options and offers, now we just need to narrow it down to our favorite.
Trainings. Our tutorial instructors have been chosen and are featured on our website! There is a wide range of trainings this year from excellent instructors. Please check them out here!
Saturday Events. The trainers have been chosen for our “Getting Started With SAS” and Python/R Day events. We are currently working on updating our website with our instructor bios and event details, so keep checking back to learn more!
Charity. Our featured charity this year is Mobile Baykeeper. Mobile Baykeeper is a broad organization with a vested interest in the health and wellbeing of the Mobile Bay Watershed and Coastal Alabama. Throughout the year, this team works tirelessly to clean up, monitor, conduct research, and educate the surrounding community to ensure the Mobile area maintains its richness for years to come. This year, we want to show additional support for our charity by making more environmentally conscious decisions about how we run our conference. This includes accessibility of recycle bins, compostable dinnerware, limited printed papers/handouts (increased utilization of our virtual formats), and many more. We want to be our charity’s partner as well as a promoter! To learn more about the Mobile Baykeeper mission, please visit their website. To donate, please visit our fundraising page!
HOW & BYOD. For Hands-On Workshops this year, we will be doing a Bring Your Own Device format! We are currently working on getting the instructions together for posting on our website, so stay tuned for more information. We will be providing instructions for access to software through AWS as well as SODA (SAS On Demand for Academics) in order to meet the demand an comfort of our individual presenters and attendees.
There is so much more going on than can be summarized in a brief blog post, but I hope this gives you some insight into how far we have come in our planning over the past month. Thank you all for your support!
