I've been the President of NESU for almost three months now and I thought it would be a good idea to tell you a little bit of what I have done so far.
We had a meeting with Country reps in November and we talked about the future of NESU and the upcoming conference in Iceland next autumn. You can find the minute of the meeting from the minutes section in nesu.net. We talked a lot about NESU's internationalization and I got lucky when I received an invitation in November to a one-day conference that was held in Uppsala 22nd of January 2018. The conference was arranged by ICCA, International Congress and Convention Association and the theme was co-operation in Nordic countries. They invited ICCA members and different Nordic associations to the conference and we we're lucky to be one of those associations. They covered my flights and my stay in Uppsala and also the conference day was free for us participants.
In the conference there was around 30 different representatives from different cities and associations around Nordic. The day started with speeches from ICCA members who told us more about the idea behind ICCA. After that we had the honor to hear Jan Huggare's ideas about arranging a big event because he was the Project Control Officer of European Orthodontic Society's Congress in 2016 and he was responsible of arranging a Congress for a big group of participants. After that we got to be part of Tobias Degsell's interactive lecture about creativity. He has a background as a curator at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Sweden. We had a round table discussions about how to make smarter meetings and the results were clear, all of us thought that well planned and open communication and co-operation is the key to smarter meetings.
For NESU this event was much more than I could have ever expected. ICCA has Convention Bureaus around Nordic and those Bureaus goal is to attract meetings and events to their city. They help with the arrangements, finding the venue, accommodations, companies and activities for the meeting and the service is completely free. Meetings need to have own Project Control Officer outside ICCA who is responsible for the meeting and ICCA is there to help with the arrangements. I got contact information from the representative of Reykjavik Iceland and hopefully NESU Iceland will get a useful help from Meet in Reykjavik.
During the day we talked about the possibility to do co-operation with NESU and ICCA, and I found out that almost every Convention Bureau has contacts to the university/universities of their city or region. Now the next move is that I will gather all those contacts and start to find out if there is a possibility to get new cities and countries to NESU. At least these Convention Bureaus where really excited about our Union and thought that there would be a great chance to get active members from their cities!
All in all, everything is going well and I see this co-operation with ICCA very potential. Let's hope this works and in the future, we have more international and greater Union!