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Conference Overview

A conference to promote collaboration among IT staff at Waterloo

Information Technology (IT) is an integral part of the University of Waterloo. As IT support staff, we play an important role in the advancement and future of our institution. We are pleased to be able to bring IT people together from all across campus to share experiences and knowledge with the eighth annual Waterloo Information Technology and Information Systems (“WatITis”) conference.

This year’s theme is The Sky’s the Limit. The conference is open to all staff, faculty and students involved in IT. Registration is free and includes lunch. However, there will be a $50 charge for no-shows.

Registration begins in early November – register early, as capacity is limited. The 2010 WatITis conference will be held Tuesday, December 7, in J.R. Coutts Engineering Lecture Hall (RCH). The keynote speech will be held in RCH 101, with sessions taking place in rooms on the third floor.

Our history

The original idea for WatITis was borrowed from the University of Toronto’s TechKnowFile conference. Martin Timmerman and Ian Howard had learned about the success of this collaborative conference, and began to realize that this same idea could benefit the University of Waterloo, which, like the University of Toronto, also has a highly distributed IT infrastructure.

In the spring of 2003, a proposal was drafted and presented to the acting Associate Provost of Computing, Alan George, who endorsed it. A planning committee was formed, with members from many IT areas on campus. The Associate Provost provided funding.

For the first year the committee decided that a one day conference would be easy to plan. Appointed co-directors Ian Howard and Martin Timmerman took the lead, respectively, of the Programming Committee and the Logistics Committee. An open call for papers/topics would not be possible given the time constraints of the conference, so coordinators needed to be pro-active in soliciting papers. The desire of the planning committee was to hold the conference before the end of 2003, so that it would be possible to hold another conference in 2004.

The success of 2003 and survey results supported holding the conference annually. Since Ian Howard left for opportunities in Mali, Bob Hicks and Vic Neglia organized a committee to plan the 2004 conference, and were co-directors for a number of years. Currently, new co-directors are appointed each year; for 2010, the co-directors are Bernie Rutter and Kevin Paxman. The one day format continues to this day, and attendance remains strong.