April 2003 Peter Campbell (working in Belgium) and Alan Snow (working in The Netherlands) attended the inaugural meeting of DAMA UK in London and decided to set up a sister Chapter in The Benelux. October 2003 The "Founding Fathers" of DAMA Benelux met in Antwerp to discuss how to launch DAMA Benelux. By June 2004 DAMA Benelux held its first Conference Day at the Antwerp offices of KBC with 52 participants.

More conferences followed in December 2004, March 2005 and in June 2005. Despite this success, there was a notable lack of participation from companies and individuals located in The Netherlands. Nearly all the members were from Belgium, which is perhaps not surprising since all the Founding Fathers were working or living in Belgium....... All except one: Alan Snow.

So in the summer of 2005, Alan - together with Rick van der Lans - local Data Management ghuru, got together with the intention of forming DAMA Netherlands. We felt that the Dutch data management professions would be more motivated to participate in a DAMA Chapter which focused on The Netherlands, and so DAMA NL was born.

It is still early days, we are busy getting people interested, and will be formally launching DAMA NL at the conference "Trends in Information Management" to be held in Leiden on December 7th 2005.

For more information please contact Alan at alan.snow@ordina.nl