Our Amazing CAUSE 2016 Team

We have thanked a lot of people this week but none are more deserving than the team of folks who helped bring you this event. All the CAUSE “staff” are volunteers who have other full-time jobs, so the success of this event represents lots of effort from lots of great people. Thank you so much to the whole team!

Mike Vysocka, Social Chair
Jason Maners, Program Chair and SIG Ambassador
Brian DeConinck, Program Team, Unconference
Stephen Swart, Proposal Review Team & Event Volunteer
Terri Cook, Proposal Review Team
Claudette Fuller, Proposal Review Team
Bill Gibson, Proposal Review Team
Lamar Battle, Proposal Review Team
Tom Dorgan, Proposal Review Team
Ginny Sconiers, Proposal Review Team & Event Volunteer
Cynthia Bowers, Proposal Review Team
Beverly Vagnerini, Proposal Review Team
Louise Flinn, Publications Chair
Martin Moore, Vendor Chair
Harry Nicholos, Vendor Chair
Wayne Fee, Vendor Chair
Brent Zimmer, Networking Chair
Brandon Moore, Networking Chair
David Dunn, Networking Team
Rick Crowe, Networking Team
T.C. Powers, Networking Team
Nick Pantelidis, Networking Team
Patrick Clark, Networking Team
Billy Long, Networking Team
Greg James, Networking Team
Susan West, Event Volunteer
Matthew Long, Event Volunteer
Leslie Dare, Event Volunteer
Josh Weaver, Co-chair
Jen McFarland, Co-chair

Thursday Updates

Welcome to Day 2 of UNC CAUSE 2016! We hope the conference has started well for all of you and you are already learning new things, meeting new people, and building relationships with like-minded individuals. Please remember to complete the session feedback survey for each session you attend. Your feedback allows us to continue to improve UNC CAUSE each year.

Unconference

We had numerous folks sign up for unconference sessions. All of these will be held in the unconference room and have been updated on the online schedule and we’ve included the list below.

8:30am – Staff and Faculty (Re)Training – “Fill in the cracks”
10:30am – Shibboleth 3 and Dealing with Multi-SSO
11:30am – IT Accessibility
1:45pm – Managing Apple Devices Without Touching Them
4:15pm – Project Management

Schedule Updates

As mentioned yesterday, due to the impending arrival of Hurricane Andrew, there have been several presentations that have been cancelled, resulting in items shifting around. Please check the online schedule for the most up-to-date schedule of sessions.

Thursday Evening Social

Tonight’s evening social will be held at the Millenium Center beginning at 6:00pm. Please join us for dinner, drinks, music, and dancing! All made possible by our generous vendors.

Thank our Vendors, Get Coffee!

As mentioned yesterday, please take time to visit our vendors, learn more about what they have to offer your campus and say thanks for their support of this year’s conference. Coffee and water are available in the vendor room all day and all breaks will be held in South Main Hall as well.

If you have any questions, please stop by the registration table or contact us via social media or online. Remember to use the hashtag #unccause to tag your posts in social media!

More than a Thursday night social!

Pencil us in for Thursday! We’re holding our “More than a Thursday Night Social” at the Millennium Center, starting at 6pm. We’ll have an awesome dinner (including a tower of Krispy Kreme donuts on the dessert bar!), drinks, and a DJ that’ll keep you dancing until they push us out the door. All that and another chance to get to know the IT crowd from across the UNC system. We’ll see you there and don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes!

The Millennium Center is a short walk (0.1 mile) away from the Benton Convention Center, at the corner of West 5th and Trade Street NW.

More than a networking event

CAUSE is right around the corner! You know how this year’s theme is “More than a Conference?” Well, our Wednesday night social is “More than a Networking Event.” Join us in the vendor room between 5:30pm and 6:30pm for drinks, passed appetizers, and a chance to catch up with new and familiar faces from across the UNC system. It’s more than just networking– it’s fun!

Program News

Our call for proposals wrapped up last week (July 25th) and we’re happy to report we had a lot of interest — we received more than 100 proposals for this year’s event!

The CAUSE 2016 Program Committee is already hard at work reviewing the submissions. Our goal is to select the proposals and set the schedule, hopefully in the next week. Once we notify the speakers and get responses from the bulk of them we’ll release the schedule. Our goal for that announcement is Monday, August 15th.

Thanks very much to all of you who have submitted proposals this year! We couldn’t do this without you and we’re so excited about the range of topics for this year. Check back with us in a few weeks and start picking your favorite sessions!

Here comes 2016!

Screen Shot 2016-06-16 at 11.05.27 AMWelcome! We’re very pleased to once again be preparing for the annual UNC CAUSE conference. This year we’ll be back in Winston-Salem, NC at the lovely Benton Convention Center which is currently undergoing a massive renovation. The dates for this year are Wednesday through Friday; October 5-7th, 2016.

As some of you may know the last year has also been a significant one for the UNC CAUSE organization. We now have a governance structure and are working on developing SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that will communicate more over the course of the year and perhaps also host their own smaller regional conferences as needed. We’re very excited to see CAUSE develop more and in an effort to promote these changes this year’s conference theme is “More than a conference.” We’re hoping to use this event to establish some common and popular SIGs and find new ones that might be beneficial throughout the year. If you have any thoughts on specific SIGs or ways that we might try to promote or launch these groups, we’d love to hear them — please contact us!

Thanks for checking in and we hope you’ll come back soon to see all the exciting activities we have planned for this year!