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 over campus to share experiences and knowledge at the 20th annual Waterloo Information Technology and Information Systems (“WatITis”) conference.
The conference is open to all staff, faculty, and students involved in IT. Since 2022, WatITis has been available in a hybrid format (in-person and remote participation). Registration is free and begins in early November – register early, as in-person capacity is limited.
The 2024 WatITis conference will be held on Wednesday, December 4.
History
The original idea for WatITis was borrowed from the TechKnowFile conference at the University of Toronto. Martin Timmerman and Ian Howard had learnt 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 proactive 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 the 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-chairs for a number of years. Currently, new co-chairs are appointed every other year; for 2024, the co-chairs are Sergei Bobkin and Jordan Barnartt.