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Changes and Enhancements at VizThink

As many of you are aware VizThink has been experiencing many changes and enhancements in the last few weeks. At times just having the conference seemed like the biggest challenge we faced, but the toughest so far though have been “What happens after the conference?”

Over the past week there have been plenty of conversations between the team, our investors and trusted advisers on how to keep VizThink moving forward in this tough economic time. As with any organization the toughest decisions always come down to people, and in this case all of us on the team have made sacrifices to help keep VizThink going, which Tom Crawford laid out in an email which has just been sent to the community:

A Message from Tom

Twenty months ago we started VizThink with a mission to bring the visual thinking community together to promote the ideas, concepts and principles to the world at large. In that time, we’ve seen huge success gathering thousands of people in person and online for conferences, workshops, webinars, and regional meetings all over the world. The growth and passion of the community has truly been overwhelming.

Like many other businesses, we are not immune from the economy, and have had to make some very difficult decisions in the last 6 weeks. However, we want the movement—and yes, it’s a movement—to continue for decades to come. In order to ensure that can happen we’re making a few temporary structural changes in order to reduce costs and focus on the core mission. Effective immediately, I will be stepping into a new role as VizThink Fellow. In this role, I will be available for consulting, training, and workshops on a variety of visual thinking and learning topics. If you or your organization are interested, please feel free to contact me through the VizThink team at community@vizthink.com. I will be happy to put together something just for you.

In addition, Chris & Ryan will be moving into half time roles. We’ll still be continuing the social network, workshops, webinars, podcasts, and regional communities. In fact, they will receive new emphasis without the specter of a large conference looming around each corner. In the coming weeks, you’ll hear more details about these changes and many new exciting opportunities to get involved.

I would like to thank the investors, and particularly Rodolfo Carpintier from Digital Assets Deployment in Madrid, for their ongoing belief and support in this community. I have had a great team in Ryan Coleman & Chris Pascucci. I would like to thank Ryan for his seemingly unlimited list of great ideas, even keel, and constant sounding board, and Chris for his untiring dedication to make even the wildest idea happen with a keen sense of getting the immediate details just right while keeping an eye on the long-term goals. Both have stepped up over and over to make amazing things happen. They are great to work with and will continue to be focused on growing the community well into the future.

Most importantly, I would like to thank each of you not just for your involvement so far, but for your ongoing involvement in making this a vibrant, sustainable community. VizThink is about bringing together people just like you and letting the world know there is a better way to brainstorm, organize, and communicate information. We can’t do that without you, and need your support now, more than ever.

How can you get involved? Sign up for the online community. Participate in the forums. Register for a workshop or webinar. Attend or start a VizThink meeting in your city. Spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and customers. The more people are involved the better it gets for everybody. I look forward to seeing each of you. For questions or more details on anything in this e-mail, feel free to contact us at info@vizthink.com .

Sincerely,

–tom

So What’s Next for VizThink?
That’s a great question – as Tom mentioned in his message above you’ll be hearing a lot more in the coming weeks. In the background Chris & I, along with input from the community and our advisers will be taking a look at VizThink from top to bottom and coming up with a model that will sustain the community through this difficult patch.

We’ll be soliciting feedback from the community along the way but if you’ve got a burning idea, are willing to lend some of your time, or want to get a local community going please feel to drop me an email at community@vizthink.com.

Chris and I will miss working with Tom on a day-to-day basis – Tom’s visible presence in our podcasts, at our conferences and other events is just the tip of the iceberg to the work he’s done behind the scenes to help build and grow our community and we all owe him a great debt of gratitude for getting this thing off the ground.

So in short, we’re still here, a little smaller and with a little less time to get things done, but the important this is, VizThink is still alive and kicking. As Tom said, there’s a movement at work here and we all want to do everything we can to keep the momentum going. Thanks for joining us on this journey, and for your support going forward.

- Ryan

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