Welcome to MISA Ontario!

Are you looking for ways to become more active in your peer community through our association?  It's a personally rewarding thing to do, I can tell you from experience. 

And the timing is right because MISA Ontario wants to expand our membership involvement.  We're getting back to the basics of sharing information, fostering knowledge and bringing creative minds together to tackle common issues.

A good starting point was our annual conference in June at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology/Durham College in Oshawa, with Durham Region as host.  The theme was "Back to School" and the networking was so rewarding and fun that it reminded me of my student days.

We adopted a program at the Annual General Meeting aimed at maximizing membership opportunities for new members.  It includes increasing the number of contacts and activities that we have involving our members, expanding our outreach activities and creating new committees based on topical issues.

One of the new committees is the Web 2.0 Committee, which encourages people outside of the Executive to join.  We also hope you will take part in the lively discussions in the MuniGov.CA section of www.govloop.com.

The Web, in fact, is a focus of our membership expansion program.  We will be making greater use of this site as a resource for collaborative communications and discussion forums.  We encourage you to sign up for RSS feeds to automatically receive documents and information updates as we publish them.

And finally, through this site our members have access to the price discounts offered to municipalities across the country uniquely through MISA/ASIM Canada's Member Special Offers program.  This is how we turn collaboration into coin!

Next we look forward to the IT Security Conference to be held November 8-10 in Timmins.  You can register quickly and easily on this site - it promises to be a conference to remember for a long time.

Garry Bezruki                                                                                                                                       President, MISA Ontario       
Director, Information Management and Technology Services, City of Waterloo