Hello all .. I'm Dave Kinchlea, President and CEO of the Global Alliance of Trusted Experts.

It's May 1, spring is definitely in the air and new, fresh faces and thoughts are everywhere! Another week has gone by, one where we relaxed if only for a day or two, after the rather hectic ride to the Open House we all deserved a little less stress for a bit.

As promised last week, this is a special Open House edition of the GATEPost and. For those of you reading this, we decided to try it as a video presentation – okay, I'll say it, as a podcast. Why? Well, we believe that video (and audio if done right) is a very good communication medium that allows a lot of information to be crunched down to a short time (the ever-elusive sound-bite) but also, it is just easier to keep people's attention on video for 5 minutes than it is to give them something to read for 5 minutes – not everybody of course, but it does seem the way of the world.

And so our Open House was, as we mentioned last week, intended to be very visual. As the GATEPost is intended to be a factual account of the makings of a corporation, I feel I have to be honest and say that we did not hit a home run. It was fairly well attended, a lot of good and interested people showed up and overall I definitely think it was worth it. Our main intent was to put a hard deadline on the table for completion of a lot of things – marketing, messaging, infrastructure, policies, bylaws, agreements, … to say nothing of booze, food (thanks Sue!), cleaning, sign building, and just plain old getting ready.

I think our preparation was great, our collateral excellent, the videos quite good for our first crack at things. We didn't do such a great job on the day, too much socializing, not enough direction for the party. We let the IT folks hang around talking IT-talk in the kitchen, we didn't direct people over to our video stations and make them watch the videos … I have an better appreciation for the event staff of larger organizations, there is a lot to think about during the event itself – not just shmoozing.

Still, the feedback was positive, we did have a fantastic visit by our number #1 member, Ben Shapiro who was good enough to say “Global Alliance of Trusted Experts” ...Thanks Ben and welcome.