Virtual Symposium While I was in Germany the board had it’s next meeting and agreed to my proposal that next year’s symposium be a virtual (online only) symposium followed in 2027 by an in-person symposium. This will temporarily reduce our expenses, give us an opportunity to reach out to populations that traditionally have not attended a symposium, give the regular volunteers a much needed break, and start a 2 year planning cycle for future symposia. The virtual symposium will have most of the same events you are used to with the exception of hands on glassblowing. The virtual in 2026 and the in-person in 2027 will be will be planned by two separate groups of volunteers starting as soon as possible. Moving forward I hope to keep this 2 year planning cycle going. It would make hotel interactions much easier and put less time stress on the symposium organizers. Stay tuned as I find these committee folks and get them started. I will schedule a Town Hall Zoom Call in the near future to discuss this decision and the virtual symposium in greater detail with all interested members.
VDG Meeting I got back last night from a great trip to Germany. It was a wonderful 2 day symposium attended by 165 folks from all over the world: Germany, US, Canada, Italy, Belgium, France Norway, Denmark, Poland, and a bunch of other places. The VDG hired live real time English translators and offered wireless headsets for us non native German speakers to use during seminars, business meeting and demos. It turns out English is the universal glass language, who knew?
I sat in the VDG business meeting and met several BOD members. I hope that good connections have been started between the two organizations. In some ways the VDG faces the same sorts of problems we do: every year fewer volunteers to help with the work, mostly the same faces stepping up to volunteer, declining society enrollment while at the same time facing increasing expenses, fewer training opportunities for folks entering the field, business challenges from China and India which have rock bottom prices, not enough good quality content for their journal, ever increasing difficulty in finding a symposium location that is willing to allow open flame sessions, …. all this just like us.
On the other hand, the apprenticeship training program in Germany is government supported, produces very high quality glassblowers and continues to function well. The Certification program (Apprentice Journeyman, Master) and is universally welcomed by industry and research, as a means of determining skill levels (and pay). The VDG has a board of governance to manage the business of the VDG and a second “board” of sorts which organizes events like the annual symposium. I am intrigued by the idea and will explore this a bit further.
Klaus Paris organized a wonderful lunch conversation with the VDG magazine editor Thomas, myself, and the newly formed Polish society President, Pieter. We explored the idea of sharing articles across our respective publications translated into multiple languages to make them more universally accessible. Everyone thought the idea was good but needed further exploration as to how exactly to make it work. Stay tuned Fusion might go global.
The VDG conference lasted 2 days. The first day was a bus tour/field trip to DeDetrich followed in the afternoon by seminars and demos. The next day more demos/lectures and the business meeting. All events were held in the same large room in a business class hotel. The seminars and business meeting were in a smaller partitioned section whereas the exhibitors and demos were in the main space. This gave the exhibitors 16? hours of customer contact time spread across two days! The buffet style banquet dinner and awards ceremony was in the same main room which held the demos and exhibit booths. I’ll be exploring VDG symposium planning and expenses in more detail with several VDG board members. Stay tuned this is an exciting area of development.
Website Updates The big news is that thanks to Don in the home office, Stripe is up and running as our credit card processor. Thankfully we are done with PayPal. There have been several Stripe beta testers, the reports are that it works well. I hope that’s true for you when you need to use it the next time.
There was also a glitch in the member login system which created an endless login loop you couldn’t get out of. Once it was identified, Steve the webmaster was able to quickly resolve it. I’ve deleted some 20+ unused pages of the website and a number of unused plugins with more to come. The goal of deleting this unused material is to improve the speed of the site as well as the back end navigation of all those who maintain it. This project will continue for several months.
Best regards
Erich Moraine
ASGS President
