Convene Reads: War

Meetings and conferences have always played a key role in the world of warfare -- from planning battles to negotiating peace treaties -- but, still, it's a little jarring to see one pop up in the middle of Sebastian Junger's War. The book follows a U.S. Army platoon deployed in Afghanistan's harrowing Korengal Valley -- "too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off" -- and Junger's account is determinedly ground-level, following the soldiers through the thrill, boredom, relief, agony, triumph, and ultimate hell of near-endless combat.

Sometimes the fighting stops, at least for a little while. In one of those cases, the result is this riveting scene:

A few days after I arrive, [Captain Dan] Kearney puts together a shura of valley elders, and the provincial government flies in for it. The meeting starts in what must have been a rather incredible way for the locals: a young American women from USAID speaking in Pashto about plans for the valley. After that, the governor gives a passionate speech about what this area could be if the locals stopped fighting and accepted government authority. He's dressed in a suit and vest, and it's quite possibly the first suit and vest the locals have ever seen. When he's done a young man stands up, eyes bright with hate, and says that the Americans dropped a bomb on his brother's house in Kalaygal and killed thirteen people. "If the Americans can't bring security with their guns and bombs, then they should just leave the valley," he shouts. "Otherwise there will be jihad!"

PCMA 365: A Conversation Without End

Virtual drum roll, please.

PCMA has just launched a new “PCMA365” virtual environment And it is accessible to everyone in the industry — not just members — through the PCMA website, using this link.

While it's cutting edge, it is not just one more shiny technology tool that will be replaced by something else in a few months. It’s a work-in-progress that will bring many of the activities that PCMA members already are engaged in under one virtual roof, with the goal of making it much easier for individuals to connect with each other and with online education and other resources.

I checked in with PCMA’s Senior Marketing Manager, Mary Reynolds Kane, to find out more about the space:

How would you describe PCMA365?

Mary: As the name suggests, it is a virtual space that will offer opportunities to engage every day of the year. It will be open 24-7, so that PCMA members and meetings industry professionals can network and share ideas with one another all the time, not just when we have meetings and other events. What you see right now is just the beginning — we are in no way finished. PCMA is a kind of laboratory for improving meetings, and we will be building the virtual environment in phases, with the goal of demonstrating best practices and strategies that members can go out and build their own. It will help break new digital ground in areas like virtual trade show booths, integrating games into meeting experiences and much more.


How do you hope people will use PCMA365?

Mary: We want to be able to help people network seamlessly. In PCMA365, you can easily send e-mail, participate in general discussions, or set up private chats. You also Tweet in the environment and connect with Facebook and LinkedIn networks.

Convene Reads: The Wave

* This photo, of Tahiti's Teahupoo wave, is courtesy of Duncan Rawlinson

I've been meaning to write a new post for a while now, as I've been reading (and am now nearly finished with) this great book called The Wave: In the Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey, the editor in chief of O, The Oprah Magazine.

I'm a bit nuts about the sea — so it was cool to read about a gathering of others who share the same obsession (albeit in a much more science-y way). Casey writes about the Tenth International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting and Coastal Hazard Symposium, which she attended at Oahu's Turtle Bay Resort in 2007:

Every two years the world's most eminent wave scientists gather somewhere to exchange information, present papers, compare notes, and above all, to argue.

Convene On Site: DC Convention Hotel Groundbreaking

Technically, it was a groundbreaking ceremony for the long-delayed Washington, D.C., convention center hotel project, but really, Wednesday morning's event could have been a local chapter meeting for Meetings Mean Business. Because almost every single one of the 13 VIP speakers on stage -- from DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, to Mayor-Elect Vincent Gray, to Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, to Marriott International Chairman and CEO J.W. Marriott Jr. -- talked about the local economic impact of the 1,175-room, $520-million Washington Marriott Marquis property that is going to be built right across the street from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

What Open Community Means for Meetings

Convene is happy to be taking part in the virtual book tour Maddie Grant, CAE, and Lindy Dreyer are doing to explore concepts from Open Community: A Little Book of Big Ideas for Associations Navigating the Social Web. in In this post, Maddie and Lindy answer a few questions for Convene's readers.

First, tell us a little bit about the book. Why did you write Open Community?

Lindy: Well, the community forming online around your organization (and your meeting!) is bigger than you may think. That’s an opportunity and a challenge.

Maddie: Lindy and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web--from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff (and members!), to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. We decided to write Open Community as a way to address those frustrations and redirect the thinking about using social tools to build community online.

How iPads Can Make Meetings More Accessible

An article in today's New York Times talks about power of the iPad to open up the world for the disabled, including a 7-year-old-boy with a motor-neuron disease. The iPad has been so quickly embraced by disabled users, the story points out, because it comes right out the box with built-ins like closed captioning, magnification, and audible read-outs.

It reminded me of an exchange I had last May with Phillip Arbuckle, the president of MeetingTrack, in Kansas City. Phillip had already grasped the iPad's potential to help attendees with hearing and vision loss enhance their meeting experience.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to another edition of Extra, Extra!, wherein we round up interesting news from around the meetings industry. Here's what's news this week:

More so than many other cities, Las Vegas has had a rough time of it since the recession. But things may be looking up: According to stats from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, convention attendance for Aug. 2010 (the most recent month for which data was available) topped out at 345,095 — a remarkable 46.3 percent rise over Aug. 2009's total. Now, one reason for this marked increase is that two major trade shows, MAGIC (75,000 attendees) and World Market Center (50,000), were held this year in August rather than their traditional September — but still: If Sept. 2010 convention attendance numbers hold up, it could mean that Las Vegas is back on a hot streak.

It's Not PowerPoint. It's You.

YOU SUCK AT POWERPOINT!

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This presentation is a front-runner in SlideShare's annual contest to find the World's Best Presentation. You can enter your own presentation through next Monday, Nov. 15, or visit the site to browse entries.

You're guaranteed to find some ideas for things you'd like to try -- or vow to avoid.

Speaking of the latter, if you have a presentation horror story to share, there's a place for that, too. 3M is looking for the 10 worst presentation horror stories. The more embarrassing and dreadful the better. Like the time a panelist fell asleep on stage during a presentation ...

The Architecture of Face-to-Face

Architect Witold Rybczynksi has just published a book called Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities. In an article in Slate that was adapted from the book, Rybczynksi traces the development of the American city from compact, densely populated, heavily industrial environment to decentralized, far-flung metropolitan area. It's an interesting read, and comes with the added benefit of validating this thing of ours:

Virtually every technological innovation of the last 50 years has facilitated, if not actually encouraged, urban dispersal. But the long-term effects of new technologies are often unpredictable. The telephone is, on the face of it, a decentralizing device. Yet telephone communication made working in high-rise office buildings practicable, which in turn produced the concentrated central business district. ... Laptops, personal digital assistants, and cell phones are held to be the tips of a great dispersal iceberg, but the migration of work to the motel room and the home office has been accompanied by a countervailing trend: the need for face-to-face contact. That is why there are more conferences, retreats, and conventions than ever before.

What do you think? Does technology create an ever-increasing demand for face-to-face interaction? If it does, is there an endpoint -- where technology will become sufficiently advanced to replicate face-to-face interaction perfect?

In Praise of Print — and Twitter and YouTube and ...

I've been thinking a lot lately about triangulation, in regards to how I learn about things. Since I work for a print magazine, and have loved the medium ever since I spent my babysitting earnings on Seventeen, I am not exactly an unbiased bystander.

But I feel like I am starting to see a new information landscape emerge, one that is animated by the streams of data, opinions, and observations that fly second-by-second across our laptop and phone screens, but also anchored by traditional news sources with rock-solid reputations for accuracy and trustworthiness.

For example, when a freakish hailstorm hit Brooklyn, where I live, a few weeks ago, I jumped on TweetDeck and entered the hashtag #brooklyn as soon as ice began pelting the window. There were lots of incredulous reports, and plenty of bon mots (My favorite: "Tom Hanks must be filming You've Got Hail!"). But for a more comprehensive look at the storm, I turned to the New York Times, which posted a story on its "CityRoom" blog later that night. Newspapers and news websites may be slower to broadcast news, but I know from my days reporting breaking news, that no matter how urgent the story, getting the facts right trumps being first. I might have been able to piece together a picture of the storm together myself, but I was glad someone was already working on it.