This is the News

The CDISC English Speaking User Group (www.esug.org.uk) is fast approaching its third birthday and, as time passes, we firmly believe that we are not only making significant progress in promoting the work and deliverables of CDISC amongst the English speaking world, but also developing the tools and structures which will help us to continue to do this in the months and years ahead.

The work of the group is organised through the ESUG committee and a sign of our developing maturity is that, in the past 12 months, we have experienced our first turnover of “willing volunteers” to share the responsibility for organising and promoting our activities. 

This year, we have lost Jason Housley (Co-Chair) to an internal promotion and increasing responsibilities within the wider CDISC environment.  As a founder member of the group and an energetic promoter of the CDISC brand, we were sad to see Jason depart.  Equally, two other founder members of the committee, Donald Paterson and Stephen Harrison, also took their leave for reasons of work commitments and geographic relocation.  We wish them well and thank them for their significant contributions to the establishment of our group.

To balance the departures, we are delighted to have welcomed Jo McAllorum and Alan Cantrell to the committee, which now comprises 9 individuals, and who may be seen and contacted on our website under the Committee section.  This area, and other aspects of the Portal, is now receiving regular updates and improvements to increase their relevance and usefulness to our expanding network.

As this document goes to press, we are halfway through our schedule of events for 2010, having held a web conference call on DEFINE.XML in May and a Face-to-Face meeting at Brunel University in July.  Both events have been extremely well attended and in the latter case we were oversubscribed and had to implement a registration recycling system for reserved places which were subsequently not required.

Later in September, we have our second TC of the year entitled “CDISC SDTM Validation: How can we do it right? (general)” and we will round out our activities with a second Face-to-Face meeting in December.  Details of all of this and all past, present and future activities may be found at www.esug.org.uk.

Over the course of this year, the committee has worked hard to strengthen its relationship with the main body of the CDISC organisation.  This is now delivering significant added value to the ESUG community through the participation of senior CDISC representatives at our events and support for the administrative side of our activities.  All of this is very much appreciated.

At the beginning of the year, the committee established goals for the ESUG activities as a means of measuring the success of our efforts and to evaluate if the quality and appeal of what is offered is attracting a growing number of followers & supporters.  We will formally review our performance when our schedule of events has been concluded but the indications from the first half of our 2010 programme is that we are expanding our audience and providing relevant and high quality material to assist the English Speaking community with additional tools and knowledge to access and take advantage of the CDISC initiative.  This is very pleasing and a reassurance that the hard work put in by ESUG committee is appreciated by our growing list of contacts.

Why not get in touch with us and let us know your interest in all matters CDISC related.  Here’s how:

Register for an event by emailing: registrations@esug.org.uk
or
Contact the committee by emailing: committee@esug.org.uk