Greetings from Atlanta!
Greetings from Atlanta!Your HEDW Board recently met in Atlanta, Georgia for the Fall Board meeting. Despite the disruption of Hurricane Helene’s impending arrival, the Board was able to work through a packed agenda and work through many details related to the HEDW 2025 Conference in Atlanta (April 6-9, 2025). Here are a few conference updates:
- Watch for an announcement soon regarding Call for Proposals. Based on your feedback, we are making some changes to provide more information to attendees to help them justify their attendance at the conference and have additional information to guide them when building their agenda.
- The Georgia Tech Conference Center is a great location. Situated immediately adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus, it is readily accessible, has great facilities and food, and the area around the Center is very walkable.
- While sessions are very important, your feedback has been clear in that the networking time is also important to your conference experience. We are working to building an agenda that maximizes your opportunities for both.
- Just as we face in our day jobs, the cost of putting on the conference continue to increase. Know that we are doing everything we can to minimize the registration increase for this year.
- Look for more conference registration information later this fall.
One of the important outcomes of this meeting was the adoption of ‘themes’. As we continue to strive to make HEDW relevant for you, changes in the data world have led to the understanding that our current topic structure needs to be modernized. Starting with the Call for Proposals, we are embracing the following themes as a structure for our content:
- Data Strategy, Culture, and Organization
- Data Architecture and Engineering
- Data Insights and Analytics
- Data Governance and Stewardship
While there are many subcomponents of each theme and some content may include multiple themes, the Board felt these themes align with current priorities in the Higher Education data world and adopting them through the HEDW website, conferences, training, and webinars would provide a more relevant and consistent experience for our members. As part of this change, we will also be looking to embed features into our website that enhance search capability around these themes.
Be on the lookout for an exciting announcement on November 1!
We always like to hear from the membership so feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts and questions at hedwcomm@hedw.org.