Why IAA?
IAA provides many long-term benefits to both industry and academia. For academia, a driven and passionate student will have an un-surpassed interest for the ability to learn and solve problems side-by-side with industry professionals. A student strives to learn real-world applications and technologies with an end result of being better prepared for the professional world.
For industry, the ability to directly affect and influence the education and promotion of .Net offers a clear recruiting pool for the most driven and passionate students at a given academic institution. Effectively the most involved students will show a demonstrated passion directly to industry with an end result of illustrating the best leaders of tomorrow.
"I believe that creating a strong partnership between academia and industry will serve both sectors quite well and strengthen the developer community. Students often provide new and unique ideas and approaches to solving problems and professionals have real-world experience to share. When you put those two together, you've got a powerful combination."
-Jacob Cynamon, Microsoft Developer Community Champion
IAA Certification
IAA Certification is an Annual Certification Award presented to user-group communities that share an Alliance between Industry and Academia. A cross-group collaboration and a genuine interest in each other’s need is a must.
· Annual Certification Award – Student leaders graduate every year. An annual award promotes the continued existence and collaboration of IAA groups even through the loss of student leadership. IAA essentially provides an effective structure for the continuation of INETA Academic based users-groups through the stability of the professional group.
· IAA Award Logo: An award logo that is granted to IAA Certified users-groups to display proudly as an elite hybrid community with a passion for collaborative learning.
· Qualifications: The extent of collaborations between groups is currently being determined by INETA, INETA Academic and a newly forming INETA Academic Student Committee. The broad requirement is proven group collaboration and a strong sense of focus for the two area’s needs.
“The IAA makes sense and it’s about time to start close collaboration.”
Martin Schray, Microsoft Academic Relations Manager
INETA Academic Student Committee
Comprised of some of the top student leaders in the world; these individuals show a demonstrated excellence in the community and a willingness to provide help to their peers and represent the student pulse of INETA. Each student leader represents a geographic region and is able to interface with INETA professional groups and Academic groups in a way to promote the overall unification necessary to achieve IAA Certification.
IAA Roadmap
May 23rd, 2004 is the first public announcement of the Industry-Academia Alliance. This program has been discussed at length for sometime and the INETA Users-Group Leaders’ Summit was the perfect opportunity to launch it publicly. Following this date a draft framework, certification criteria, and a gathering of special resources that are available to working with industry and academic groups will be formed.
September Timeframe will begin a pilot program with specially selected user-groups. These groups will be a test run to help finalize a structured framework to simplify the implementation of the IAA mission.
December/January Timeframe will have established and tested criteria for successful INETA IAA-Certified users-groups. This time frame will begin open enrollment and qualifications to become an IAA-Certified users-group.
A Special Thanks To…
A special thanks to INETA and especially INETA’s Academic board for helping to make this program a reality. Also, thanks to Lorraine Wolfe the Academic Marketing Manager on the Student Committee for designing the logo, this infopack, and the ongoing marketing campaign of IAA. Next, thanks to James Griffith and Paul Hacker for their continued insight and guidance as Academic Regional Directors (West and Mid-West, respectively) in the development of an effective strategy for implementing the IAA mission. A special thanks to Martin Schray for all of his support and ventures in working through many scenarios of running an IAA group. Finally, thanks to everyone else who has helped continue to share the vision of an Industry-Academic Alliance.
Comments
One of the greatest things about INETA is that it is a huge community so any help that you can provide the committee for implementing and increasing IAA’s success will be of great value.
So please, if you have any comments, questions, or awesome ideas that you don't want to post please feel free to email Andrew Flick at aflick@mvps.org .