Update: Love Parade

The organizers of the 2010 Love Parade music festival, where 21 people were killed and hundreds more were injured in a human stampede last month, have created a website that seeks to analyze and explain how the catastrophe happened: "Just like the victims' families, the participants and the general public, we, too, must understand what happened on 24 July 2010. This website is an expression of the fact that we accept this responsibility."

An honest attempt at transparency? A pragmatic attempt to deflect blame or limit liability? Both? Neither? Regardless, the maps, documents, and videos that the Love Parade team makes available on the site offer interesting and valuable information about event staging, especially when it comes to how crowds move.

Thanks, once again, to the MeCo group for staying on top of this story.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's Extra, Extra! — all the news that wasn't fit to print in our weekly ThisWeek newsletter. Let's get right into it:

We all know that cell phones are great for killing time during meetings. That's a given. But what else are they used for, besides talking, texting, Tweeting, and solitaire-playing?

According to results from the Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2010 Portrait of American Travelers survey, 19 percent of all travelers have used their phone to download a travel-related app; 47 percent have gotten around using their phone's built-in GPS; and 46 percent have searched for flight information.

"Clearly, mobile devices are destined to play an increasingly important role in the distribution and sale of travel services in years ahead," said Ypartnership Chairman and CEO Peter C. Yesawich. Click here for more on what people are using their phones for.

The Emmys Love 'Temple Grandin'

A big winner at last night's Emmy Awards was HBO's "Temple Grandin," which picked up seven honors in the "Miniseries or Movie" category -- for best TV movie, lead actress (Claire Danes), supporting actress (Julia Ormond), supporting actor (David Strathairn), director (Mick Jackson), single-camera picture editing (Leo Trombetta), and music (Alex Wurman). Which led Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog to ask: Uh, who exactly is Temple Grandin? Convene readers already know the answer, thanks to a Leading by Example profile of Dr. Grandin we ran last year that traced her life and career as a high-functioning autistic professor of animal science who revolutionized the field of humane livestock management. But it's nice that the rest of the world is finally catching on to her amazing story, too.

Convene Reads: The Big Short

Don't read The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis, if you're trying to keep your blood pressure down, because what this book makes clear about the economic meltdown of 2007-2008 is that it was triggered by Wall Street insiders -- bankers, bond traders, stockbrokers, hedge-fund managers -- who either didn't know what they were doing, or knew but didn't care. In creating, selling, and buying credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and other increasingly baroque financial instruments built on a foundation of shoddy subprime mortgages, Lewis writes, they were "either crooks or morons." They made billions before losing trillions of dollars of other people's money, and it would be nothing more than depressing and enraging if Lewis weren't such a great reporter and storyteller, going behind the scenes of the financial crisis from the point of view of a handful of people who bet against this insane bubble.

Finishing Strong in New Orleans

When I talked to St. Bernard Project founders Liz McCartney and Zack Rosenburg in early 2009, I got the sense they hoped that they would be out of a job by now.

After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast five years ago, the pair left their comfortable lives as Washington, D.C., professionals, and moved to New Orleans to mobilize volunteers to rebuild hurricane-damaged homes.

By Spring 2009, St. Bernard Project volunteers had rebuilt 200 homes and were working on 37 more; today they have completed more than 300 houses and 50 more are under repair. But, as McCartney has pointed out, nearly 900 families who own homes are still living in FEMA trailers. And more than 6,000 families own homes that they can't afford to rebuild.

Google Wave, We Hardly Knew Ye

Friends, Americans, meeting planners, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Google Wave, not to praise it.

So it goes. Perhaps many of you out there in TV Land were not even aware of Google Wave's existence; and, if you were, you still may not have had any idea about what it was or what it did — and I'll wager it was an even smaller minority that had a clue how to use the thing. I sure didn't.

But it seemed promising, at first. And now it's departed. Earlier this week — which is how I learned of its untimely demise — Slate's Farhad Manjoo wrote a good post-mortem of this "real-time communication and collaboration" website that Google unveiled last year.

Snapping Out of It

We could use a little more white space in our lives.

So says Juliet Funt, owner of Talking With Purpose Inc., although space was a bit of an issue at her presentation at the 2010 ASAE Annual Meeting and Expo in Los Angeles this week. When all the chairs in the session filled up, attendees lined up in the back, sat on the floor, and stood in the doorway and hall in order to hear Funt speak.

What was the big draw? First of all, Funt has a terrific presence. She's funny and down-to-earth, and tells great stories. And her topic, managing overwork and chronic stress, was one that everyone in the room seemed to relate to. If you sometimes feel like a hamster on a wheel trying to fit it all in, you are not alone.

Funt, the daughter of "Candid Camera" creator Allen Funt, also gave the audience practical tips for reclaiming their lives -- and their meetings -- from overload: Answer e-mail five times a day, not around the clock. Resist the impulse to grab your phone when you get a spare moment, and actually look at people around you. Put your cellphone in the glove box when you drive. Draw some boundaries by countering requests with your own request to take a day to think it over.

And she suggested ways that meeting planners could give attendees a little more space, too.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's Extra, Extra!, where we give air time to all the news that wasn't fit to print in PCMA's weekly ThisWeek newsletter.

According to this story in the New York Times, written by a former meetings-industry journalist, the tide of eco-friendly hotels may have — at least for the time being — crashed upon the rocks of recession. One hotelier, who is also a Green Meeting Industry Council board member, said, "Big-ticket items that have long-term return on investment have definitely been put on the back burner."

Quick: Name the most boring thing ever. If you said, "in-flight magazines," you are correct — but maybe not if you consider the airline magazine of the new Afghani airline Safi Airways. In its pages, you can brush up on "Kabul heroin addicts, photos of bullet-pocked tourist sites, and ads for mine-resistant sport-utility vehicles," writes the Wall Street Journal reporter. Who needs to watch, say, Marley & Me for the 500th time when you've got that to read?

Earlier this summer, Stefanie Syman published a book called The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, which traces the history of, well, yoga in America, from its Transcendentalist origins to widespread acceptance by people from all walks of life — even while on the road, as this story from Hotel Interactive discusses. According to the article, business-traveling yogis should seek out Kimpton hotels in particular, as the company is big on the amenity.

Here's some good news for fans of the Crescent City (aka New Orleans, aka N'walins, aka the Big Easy): The 1,193-room Hyatt Regency New Orleans, which has been closed since Hurricane Katrina struck, broke ground last week on its $275 million reopening project! In addition to getting the Hyatt back up to par for a reopening sometime next year, the renovation will also add 200,000 square feet of meeting space, plus two restaurants, two bars, and a coffee shop.

Last but not least, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (great newspaper name, that) reports that the city's planning commission has approved the design for a new downtown convention center — which, by the way, looks really cool: Click through here for the story — featuring an aerial rendering of the new convention center, which appears as though it will feature lots of light and green space.

Introducing: Booth Crawling at ASAE

When I did a story in the July issue about using Foursquare at meetings industry events, I ended up writing more about the potential for using the application than about exhibitions or meetings that were actually using it. As Kevin Richardson, CRM manager for Freeman, put it, to most people in the meetings industry, "Foursquare still means a game that they played as kids." That could soon change, Richardson added, as exhibitors began to experiment with new ways of connecting with people using the application.

And that's exactly what's happening at ASAE's 2010 Annual Meeting and Expo 2010 in Los Angleles, where nine technology services exhibitors have teamed up to create the "Tradeshow Booth Crawl." Attendees who use Foursquare to check in at all the booths on the exhibition floor at the LA Convention Center become eligible for prizes, including gift cards, a camera, and an iPad.

Business was brisk today, the opening day of the Expo. The game required attendees to ask booth personnel to initial a gameboard, which proved to be a great conversation starter. “Technology is changing the way we build relationships, but people create relationships," said Jim Kelly, COO of Syscom Services, a participating company. "The booth crawl is designed with people in mind. We hope this social experiment will not only increase traffic to our booths and bring attention to our new products and services, but create a platform for engagement among conference attendees. Let’s give them something to talk about!”

Then We Came to the End

This morning my younger daughter went off to preschool camp for the last time; in two weeks, she starts kindergarten. So today was all about endings and beginnings -- two things that school is very good at making you aware of, in a formal, carefully delineated sort of way. For every grade, there's always a first day of school and always a last; and when you've run through all the grades, there's a grand event to mark the occasion, full of pomp and circumstance (as well as "Pomp and Circumstance").

The meetings industry, too, is very good at officious beginnings, what with our welcome receptions and opening-night cocktail parties and gaveled-to-order general sessions. But endings? I'm not so sure. I've been to meetings that have ended with a bang, in the form of a closing-night awards dinner, or a final keynote luncheon, or a closing general session. But I've also attended meetings that haven't ended so much as they've drifted apart -- in a series of half-attended late-afternoon caucuses, or a half-hearted final tour of the exhibit hall, with no centralized mechanism to sum things up and thank everyone for attending.

And maybe that's not a bad thing. And maybe having a formal closing event isn't a good thing. What do you think? Is it important not just to end a meeting, but to let attendees know you're ending it?