Hi, It's my turn, apparently. I've been really enjoying this discussion, not least because some of my favorite thinking-people have been contributing, and I don't get to see those people IRL as much any more. My first EVER academic conference was AoIR in Toronto. I was a MASTER'S student and I felt completely out of my league. But people were really, really nice and good to me. Not just nice as in "remembering my name", but nice as in, "providing constructive criticism and treating me like a colleague". To me, that was the key difference between AoIR and other conferences - the collegiality. That collegiality also extended to the list, and to the interactions I had with AoIR folks outside of conferences. I haven't been able to make it to an AoIR conference in a couple of years, but I participated remotely in Terri's Kissing Booth in 2011 and last year I attempted to virtually "crash" the last AoIR banquet using Twitter. The lovely people who were so nice to me in 2003 perhaps appreciated that too; as a Master's student I didn't have enough money to go to the banquet and AoIR let me go anyway. Then they sat me with real live professors who I had hilarious conversations with. Ten years is a long time. It's enough time for edgy grad students to finish their studies and struggle through postdocs and finally find jobs, and it's enough time for technologies too to become institutionalized. The thing that was still "emerging" and "hybrid" and strange and weird and exciting (at least to academics) in 2003 is now the main infrastructure of commerce, government information, and vast parts of our everyday social interaction. This means that many more people want to study it, and makes conference organizing much more work because the conference has to negotiate with the broader institutionalization of 1. the phenomenon and 2. the scholarship of the phenomenon. That's hard to do, especially if you want to leave room for creative and edgy stuff, as well as leaving room to be really nice to people who are just getting their ideas and careers together. I'm in favour of retaining the "big tent" approach in conferences, on the list and in other venues. I think it represents what's best and most interesting about AoIR - the collegiality and open-mindedness. There are now dozens of other entities that are trying to get a piece of internet studies. I've been to the Web Science conferences. I'm now apparently part of a network of experts on Internet Science (!! My reflexive STS scholar-self finds this hilarious !!). These places are not doing what AoIR has been doing, although they are also contributing to attempts to make Internet Studies into a recognizable field. I'm not sure that's exactly what's required. We all know that the Internet is not one thing, and even if it were, it wouldn't stay that way. AoIR has been a place to be thoughtful about the messiness of this process, from a variety of perspectives. We still need to have places to explore the margins of technology/society interactions, even when there's pressure to form and defend a single centre. I'm sorry I won't see you in Denver. It's too far for this time. But if I have even the slightest opportunity, you'll find me squatting the Twitter feed, IM-ing in questions for the keynote speakers, or generally trying to be as productively disruptive as possible - on the internet. Alison. -- Dr Alison Powell Lecturer in Media and Communication London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE a.powell@lse.ac.uk Twitter: @a_b_powell