well, for my part, I'll take some of the old with some of the new. I remember the conference being much more inquisitive, challenging, and playful; scholarly rigor was promoted, but not promoted above inclusion of different perspectives and even strangeness. There was always a risk for the first few years that a panel wouldn't work, or a paper wouldn't really be 'strong' but that risk hasn't gone away with the push toward longer submissions and more rigor, instead it has just been transformed into a more reviewed perspective. In the first few years, I remember having great fun making a list of likely topics, and the lists always had a few humorous ones, the lists were always aimed toward inclusion of topic and discipline, and in my mind they served as recruitment devices, but they also set the tone of the conferences as 'collegial, open, interesting'. I remember regretting the decision to see the topics go, but they were replaced with other ideas. I'm not sure they were better though, either the topics or the new modes of presenting the conferences ideas, both work. I think that for me, AoIR, unlike ICA and AoIR is and should be like friends and family, and future friends. That's been the spirit that i've always approached it with, and granted I know i've grated a few people over the years with my insistence on first names and similar things, but I do think we should be an organizations where a Master's student should be encouraged to talk to the most senior people in the field without recognizing the ever present academic star system and related matters. beyond those points... I think that AoIR has felt significant pressure in the last few years to create an identity for itself that competes with other organizations, but I'm not sure competition is really what we should be after. I think we should aim to be over-arching and umbrella-like, more than unique and separable. I'd rather the thought be promoted that Aoir is the organization that you come to when your discipline, or other conference isn't enough, when you can't get your ideas addressed completely, when you truly need people that are both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, who can be models for success, who can share histories and research projects which will enable future people to do better research, etc. mostly, i see professionalism as a problem centered on the control of knowledge as Ivan Illich taught us ever so long ago, i believe we do have to pay attention to our presentation and we might appear to be professional, but we don't have to BE professional, instead we can be friends and colleagues.