UnitZeroOne

The Dutch Adobe User Group is the fastest growing dutch community for creative professionals and I'm proud to announce I'm now officially an ambassador for the Adobe User Group.

For those who know me a bit already, you'd know I used to be in the board for the User Group, and was amongst the original founders, after the Macromedia UG was rebooted as the Adobe User Group back in 2007.  In all honesty, I wasn’t able to be active beyond that point. A schedule of work, conferences and workshops has put me into a great place in my life, but I wasn't contributing to this amazing community initiative, nor working as hard as my fellow board members. These guys have lifted an huge amount of work and enthousiasm to create an amazing User Group. The work they did has put this User Group at the top of the world wide lists of user groups.

Really ? Let's talk some numbers. These days, the Dutch Adobe User Group has grown into a group of 1700 people, every themed meeting sees an average of 200 visitors. Simply amazing. This is an event anyone can join into, see great sessions, meet new people and have a general great time. All of that, for free. Make sure you subscribe as a member. The presentations given at any meeting are of an amazing quality; amongst the big names are AKQA, Wieden + Kennedy and dutch agency Achtung, who have been taking the visitor behind the scenes of their productions.

A personal highlight for me over the last year was the arrival of the "German meeting", where Powerflasher/FDT, Mario Klingemann and Andre Michelle came to show off their magic. You'll note that all the videos for this session are AVAILABLE ONLINE ! Next to sessions, there are Awards where people can send in their work, discounts for creative magazines and sponsored networking drinks afterwards. The Dutch AUG is a great platform to raise your knowledge, inspiration and network. And again, all of this is free! How's that possible ? Thanks to a wide range of corporate sponsors formed by leading industry companies.

Now, back to my role in all of this. My personal opinion was that they should've kicked me out of the management a long, long, long time ago. Instead of that, I feel honored they asked me to become their ambassador. In this role I'll try and spread the word about this user group, and hope I can be a utility to extend the success.

None of this would have been possible without these great management members:

Bert Hagendoorn (Adobe Benelux) - Manager
Niels de Keizer (Nyls.nl) - Co-manager
Mark de Jong (Streaming Media Partners Europe) - Secretary
Ben Smeets (Logica) - Treasurer
Owen van Dijk (BGP) - Founder, Program Director en Events

The next meeting will be on the 13th of May and will be themed "Games".

I'm extremely happy they asked me to fulfill the role of ambassador, and I'm not the only one, as Nalden is one too!

Related posts:

1. Adobe User Group NL XL