The ITC is holding its annual conference in Athens, Greece this year.
Right now the keynote address is being presented Arnold van der Weide, the former president of the ITC, now president of the ODA (open design alliance). He's giving the history of how he came to switch organizations. For a while, he was president of both, but found himself too busy, and decided that the ODA was more strategic, because it supports 1,000 members -- "We cannot afford to lose the ODA."
The first problem he had to solve was the $600,000 embezzlement. He found the the ODA were no checks and balances, no budget, no independent finance manager, no annual audit. The board didn't know how much money was coming in or going out. He worked on adding developers, quality assurance, IT infrastructure, and chnage the associate member category (some 1,600 of them) from free to $250 handling fee to receive software.
"We don't want to fight Autodesk, that is a misperception in the market place. We don't want tofight Autodesk; we want to develop software." He notes that the ODA is adding 10% new members each year.
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