By Holden O’Neal, SHARE Director of Conference Operations
This August, I took on a new role within SHARE’s leadership and became Director of Conference Operations. This role will challenge me in new ways and I am excited about the coming year. One of my biggest goals in 2019 is to help incorporate new topics into the conference – something I’ll discuss further in this message.
I am proud to restate here that the SHARE Program Council and Operations Team recently launched the technical agenda for SHARE Phoenix. This was an all-hands-on-deck effort. Each SHARE volunteer involved played a vital role in the process and their work is greatly appreciated.
I am very excited for the experience that has been crafted for SHARE in Phoenix. From start to finish, this event will be one for the books. The offsite SHARE St. Louis welcome reception at Ballpark Village was so successful that we have decided to offer a similar type of event again. We will kick off SHARE Phoenix with an exciting off-site welcome reception at the Corona Ranch, a scenic rodeo ground near the foothills of Arizona’s South Mountain. Keep an eye out for emails from SHARE leading up to the event so you can plan your travel accordingly.
Captain Mark Kelly will take the stage at Monday morning's keynote in Phoenix, with his presentation “Endeavor to Succeed.” Kelly is a NASA space mission commander, having served on four space shuttle missions and as commander of the final flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. In 2011, Kelly faced one of the toughest challenges of his life when his wife, then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was the target of an attempted assassination. Kelly’s perseverance in his personal and professional life is beyond noteworthy and I look forward to the words of wisdom he will share.
SHARE Phoenix will have something for everyone, from those trying to learn something new to subject matter experts. As always, the event will have a mix of technical sessions, user experience presentations, hands-on labs, networking opportunities, and more. Similar to SHARE St. Louis, there will be zEscape Room challenges with updated content. Conference hot topics will include (but are not limited to) Security in the Enterprise, z/OS Systems Programming, and Cloud Technology in the Enterprise. (Again, all of this can be found in the recently launched technical agenda.) With the recent announcement of Zowe in St. Louis and the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, there will be plenty of new technical information to learn regarding these technologies in the coming year.
We’re also pleased to announce a new hot topic at the SHARE Phoenix conference and beyond: Zowe & Open Source. If you search this hot topic in the technical agenda, you’ll see a number of sessions, including labs that allow for hands-on experience with the Zowe command line interface, sessions that present user experiences on installing and configuring Zowe, as well as presentations on how to contribute to the platform. I look forward to these sessions and the feedback that comes out of SHARE Phoenix as a whole, to continue building momentum as we look to SHARE Pittsburgh later in 2019.
As the 2019 Director of Operations, I hope to bring a unique perspective and open mind to benefit the onsite experience for SHARE event attendees, as well as improve the experience of being a SHARE volunteer or member.
I look forward to seeing you at SHARE Phoenix in March 2019. Have a safe holiday and a happy new year!
Holden O’Neal
SHARE Director: Conference Operations