From: Hugh Murray
To: "'network@ukhrd.com'"
Subject: First UKHRD/IPD live event a success
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 12:11:17 -0000

Last Thursday evening, at the Forum Hotel in Kensington, we held the first "live" meeting of UK-HRD members as part of the IPD Central London Branch
Conference.

We approached the evening with some trepidation. We were afraid we might only get two or three people turning up. As it turned out, we had around 50 people in the room for most of the one-and-a-half-hours and the atmosphere was electric. Altogether, we worked our way through 30 bottles of wine and
plenty of food, but it was worth every penny to see the network come to life in such a vibrant fashion.

The fascinating thing was that so many of us "knew" each other, even though we had never met! There were constant cries of, "so YOU'RE Fred/Freda Bloggs" from around the room and, no doubt, lots of stifled exclamations of, "but I thought you were dark/tall/Asian/a woman/etc.! Although most of you came from the London area, we had some visitors who had come from as far away as the Welsh Mountains (and Swindon).

A considerable amount of networking took place, with cards being swapped everywhere, and I would be very surprised if quite a lot of consultancy business does not arise out of the evening, plus a fair amount of exchange between training departments.

Thank you to all of you who came and thank you to my Fenman colleagues and to Martin and Mike at the Central London Branch of the IPD for organising the evening.

I gave a short talk at the otherwise purely social meeting on how we see the network developing . The main improvement we want to introduce is to put a searchable database of postings onto the Web so that you can all search the
archives to see what people have said in the past about any topic. This is quite technically superior to the system we now have and will involve some considerable further investment in the network. But we intend to do it just
as soon as we can.

It is obvious that "real" meetings are going to be an important part of UKHRD from now on. We are planning a series of "UKHRD Live" events around the country over the next few months. In addition to what we are doing,
there are a number of informal groupings now coming into existence around the country.....

The network is now well on its way towards 2000 members (I don't have the actual figure to hand) and it is really exciting for my colleagues and I to see the organic way in which it is developing.

Hugh Murray