June 2010 Issue: Live!

The digital edition of our June issue is hot off the binary equivalent of a web-fed offset printing press, and it's a good one. The cover story, " Generation Y Speaks," by Senior Editor Hunter Slaton, cuts through the conversation swirling around the Millennial generation by talking directly to a variety of its members working in the meetings industry. Whatever your feelings about Gen Y-ers, some of them almost certainly are your colleagues, and all of them most definitely are our future; and Hunter's article just might help you understand and appreciate them a little more. Other highlights:

Update -- Crisis Response: The Icelandic volcano eruption and the Nashville flood happened while we were putting the June issue together, and had such an immediate and direct impact on meetings and conferences in the United States and around the world that we created a new department to address them. Learn how meeting professionals on the ground responded to these disasters.

Convene Salary Survey 2009: Is the recession over? Not for respondents to our latest Salary Survey -- fewer than half of whom took home more money last year than they did the year before.

Leading by Example: Meet Kirk Bauer, who lost a leg in Vietnam, and who for the last 28 years has served as executive director of Disabled Sports USA -- bringing to people with disabilities the healing power of skiing, cycling, climbing, swimming, and dozens of other sports. Keep checking back to the blog for more photos and audio clips from our interview with Kirk.

"Social Media + Meetings": A recent online survey finds that when it comes to meeting professionals using social-media tools at their events, 12 percent are working it, 49 percent are working on it, and 14 percent are nowhere.

"The CMP Hits the Quarter-Century Mark": Contributing Editor Sara Torrence, CMP, honors the Certified Meeting Professional designation on the occasion of its 25th birthday, and runs down the latest developments for the industry's most widely recognized credential.

International Meetings: Ben Goedegebuure, sales director for the Scottish Exhibition + Conference Center, responds to James F. Hollan III's International Meetings column in our April issue -- in which Hollan explained how "North American planners and European or Asian venues come to the negotiating table with very different expectations."

Frame of Mind: A Q&A with international mountaineer and PCMA 2010 Education Conference keynoter Jamie Clarke -- from his base camp on Mt. Everest. No, really.

Other Duties as Assigned: In the second installment of our new back-page department, Vicky Betzig, CMP, talks about the one meeting where it was very helpful to be able to speak French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

Look for the text-only version of the June issue on the Convene homepage sometime within the next week.