Brandon, Deb, and Brenda looked for other Universities that had models for organizing IT community engagement and partnership. Penn State and NYU had umbrella structures for organizing IT professional development that inspired Brandon, Brenda, and Don Nelson (Bruce Maas’s chief of staff) to write a proposal to create a similar organization at UW–Madison.
They proposed providing leadership opportunities for IT Leadership Program alumni under one brand that would aggregate costs and share work among distributed co-chairs and a 3 person steering committee. Their proposal to Bruce Maas for the creation of UW-IT Connects was enthusiastically accepted.