ISWA has moved its offices to Vienna, and expects this to offer some great opportunities for its members, says Hermann Koller...
We at the ISWA General Secretariat are very pleased and proud to announce our move from temporary spaces into the permanent Austrian offices of ISWA, which became available at the beginning of February. Particular thanks should go to the city of Vienna, our gracious host, who provided the office space in this beautiful and dynamic city.
We also wish to thank the membership for its patience and understanding as we complete the transition period. The legal, business, and financial transitions are nearly complete and the (seemingly inevitable) telephone and computer installation glitches should be cleared shortly. The General Secretariat is eagerly looking forward to serving the needs of the membership from its new location. In particular, we look forward to adding necessary additional staff to the Vienna office so as to move ahead the educational and technical mission of ISWA.
During the transition phase from Denmark to Austria, the General Secretariat continued to perform the regular duties of the Association. We would like to share the following accomplishments with our membership. We have:
- hired and trained new staff in Austria and said farewell to friends and staff based in Copenhagen,
- divested many of the hard copies of books from the library and moved the balance of library materials to Vienna,
- unpacked moving boxes from Copenhagen, operated for 18 months out of a small temporary office in Vienna with just two staff in preparation for the permanent offices, repacked moving materials from the temporary offices, and are still unpacking those boxes within the permanent offices,
- upgraded and licensed the membership database to add functionality,
- upgraded the website for ease of information flow and basic enhancements,
- and retained new service providers for professional tasks and more.
The General Secretariat team has been busy in this endeavour and now warmly welcomes you (both members and potential members) to visit our offices at your convenience. There is plenty of room – you can work at our guest work spaces – and as they say in Vienna, ‘The coffee is super!’ Or, make your plans to visit during our planned open house and 40th anniversary reception, tentatively scheduled for the last weekend in September 2010. You are guaranteed a worthwhile time to both see the splendid sights of Vienna and to relax (or network) with many of your ISWA colleagues. One of our newer members put it all in a nutshell quite nicely:
‘Dear ISWA,
Congratulations on this achievement. This is the reward of untainted focus and hard work. I wish you the very best of luck, a happy stay therein and good wishes to all members and all intended members of ISWA. I hope to pay a visit to our new secretariat in Austria in the near future. Thank you.’
And we look forward to seeing you all in Hamburg at the 2010 annual congress!
Hermann Koller
e-mail: hkoller@iswa.org
