Fwd: AAUP Conference Insights?
Hi, all, I spoke at the American Association of University Presses meeting last week in SLC (only one other AoIRer there). It was a pretty good conference, and so I followed up with the program chair on how things were organized. It's a bit easier on him since they have fewer parallel sessions, and they are generally organized by panel organizers. However, it's similar in size to IR. See below. Best, Alex ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Britton <gbritton@getty.edu> Date: Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:45 PM Subject: Re: AAUP Conference Insights? To: Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net> Hi Alex: The AAUP has their conference planning down pretty tight, but that's partly because they have an office staff to handle all the logistics. As chair, my responsibilities were strictly programmatic--assemble a small committee, pick topics, and draft speakers. We (the committee) also took on the responsibility of promoting the meeting with the social networking things (Facebook and Twitter). This was new for the meeting and proved very effective. The office staff (basically one person focused on this--Susan Patton at the AAUP spatton@aaupnet.org) negotiated the hotel arrangements, rooms, field trips, meals, assembling the printed program, and multiple receptions. She also handled all the exhibitors. Susan is an organizational force and has the details down. This is crucial. As I understand it, the AAUP commits to a multi-year contract with some chain hotel to get the best rates, but this limits the cities the board can select from. This partly explains Salt Lake. With the Marriott chain, for every Washington or Philadelphia you are forced to take an Oklahoma City or Salt Lake or some other desperate little town. It's how they spread the conference business around their network of hotels. The AAUP is committed to some geographic diversity so they try for at least one western meeting ever 3-4 years. They also occasionally do a Canadian meeting, but never venture much father than that. Having said the AAUP has their system down, they don't deal with change very easily. Asking for free wi-fi in all rooms seemed to flummox them--hotels charge extra for this--and the idea of marketing the meeting seemed to escape them until we demonstrated how it could be done effectively. Given the location and publishing economy, they were praying for 400 attendees. They got about 535 including some walk-ins which still amazes me. Lost people from the lost tribe? Anyway, please ask other questions -- My best, Greg Gregory M. Britton Publisher | Getty Publications 1200 Getty Center Drive | Suite 500 Los Angeles, CA 90049 (T) 310 440 6066 | gbritton@getty.edu www.gettypublications.org -- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [x] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
This is very helpful. Clearly, we need to steal Susan Patton (kidding!). We've been doing it largely with volunteer labor, and are on the cusp of bringing in someone salaried to do--among other things--much of this work. I become president of the Association next year, and so have all sorts of grand plans. Of course, I'm sure all of my predescessors did as well... Thanks again, Alex On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net> wrote:
Hi, all, I spoke at the American Association of University Presses meeting last week in SLC (only one other AoIRer there). It was a pretty good conference, and so I followed up with the program chair on how things were organized. It's a bit easier on him since they have fewer parallel sessions, and they are generally organized by panel organizers. However, it's similar in size to IR. See below. Best, Alex
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Britton <gbritton@getty.edu> Date: Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:45 PM Subject: Re: AAUP Conference Insights? To: Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net>
Hi Alex:
The AAUP has their conference planning down pretty tight, but that's partly because they have an office staff to handle all the logistics. As chair, my responsibilities were strictly programmatic--assemble a small committee, pick topics, and draft speakers. We (the committee) also took on the responsibility of promoting the meeting with the social networking things (Facebook and Twitter). This was new for the meeting and proved very effective.
The office staff (basically one person focused on this--Susan Patton at the AAUP spatton@aaupnet.org) negotiated the hotel arrangements, rooms, field trips, meals, assembling the printed program, and multiple receptions. She also handled all the exhibitors. Susan is an organizational force and has the details down. This is crucial.
As I understand it, the AAUP commits to a multi-year contract with some chain hotel to get the best rates, but this limits the cities the board can select from. This partly explains Salt Lake. With the Marriott chain, for every Washington or Philadelphia you are forced to take an Oklahoma City or Salt Lake or some other desperate little town. It's how they spread the conference business around their network of hotels. The AAUP is committed to some geographic diversity so they try for at least one western meeting ever 3-4 years. They also occasionally do a Canadian meeting, but never venture much father than that.
Having said the AAUP has their system down, they don't deal with change very easily. Asking for free wi-fi in all rooms seemed to flummox them--hotels charge extra for this--and the idea of marketing the meeting seemed to escape them until we demonstrated how it could be done effectively. Given the location and publishing economy, they were praying for 400 attendees. They got about 535 including some walk-ins which still amazes me. Lost people from the lost tribe?
Anyway, please ask other questions --
My best,
Greg
Gregory M. Britton Publisher | Getty Publications 1200 Getty Center Drive | Suite 500 Los Angeles, CA 90049 (T) 310 440 6066 | gbritton@getty.edu www.gettypublications.org
-- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [x] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
-- -- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
Yes well, there has been for some time a push to standardize things, while allowing some freedom. The two axes seem to sway a bit, but one thing that I've found when the pragmatics of real labor are dropped at someone's foot, things do tend to get simpler. Personally, I support a standard format for the conference, much like we have now, where we'd then only have a program chair and locations would just be chosen by either the executive committee, or a committee based on guidelines that are similar the north america/not north america division we seem to be practicing now. the goal is of course to remove the work of the conferences, so that we can free up labor to do things that are also of interest to the association members. On Jun 29, 2010, at 2:06 PM, Alex Halavais wrote:
This is very helpful. Clearly, we need to steal Susan Patton (kidding!). We've been doing it largely with volunteer labor, and are on the cusp of bringing in someone salaried to do--among other things--much of this work. I become president of the Association next year, and so have all sorts of grand plans. Of course, I'm sure all of my predescessors did as well...
Thanks again,
Alex
Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Political Science Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow Center for Information Policy Research Everything you can imagine is real. --Pablo Picasso
With apologies to Mr. Britton and all, I've fallen into the trap of sending to the list unintentionally. Please ignore... - Alex On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net> wrote:
Hi, all, I spoke at the American Association of University Presses meeting last week in SLC (only one other AoIRer there). It was a pretty good conference, and so I followed up with the program chair on how things were organized. It's a bit easier on him since they have fewer parallel sessions, and they are generally organized by panel organizers. However, it's similar in size to IR. See below. Best, Alex
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Britton <gbritton@getty.edu> Date: Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:45 PM Subject: Re: AAUP Conference Insights? To: Alex Halavais <alex@halavais.net>
Hi Alex:
The AAUP has their conference planning down pretty tight, but that's partly because they have an office staff to handle all the logistics. As chair, my responsibilities were strictly programmatic--assemble a small committee, pick topics, and draft speakers. We (the committee) also took on the responsibility of promoting the meeting with the social networking things (Facebook and Twitter). This was new for the meeting and proved very effective.
The office staff (basically one person focused on this--Susan Patton at the AAUP spatton@aaupnet.org) negotiated the hotel arrangements, rooms, field trips, meals, assembling the printed program, and multiple receptions. She also handled all the exhibitors. Susan is an organizational force and has the details down. This is crucial.
As I understand it, the AAUP commits to a multi-year contract with some chain hotel to get the best rates, but this limits the cities the board can select from. This partly explains Salt Lake. With the Marriott chain, for every Washington or Philadelphia you are forced to take an Oklahoma City or Salt Lake or some other desperate little town. It's how they spread the conference business around their network of hotels. The AAUP is committed to some geographic diversity so they try for at least one western meeting ever 3-4 years. They also occasionally do a Canadian meeting, but never venture much father than that.
Having said the AAUP has their system down, they don't deal with change very easily. Asking for free wi-fi in all rooms seemed to flummox them--hotels charge extra for this--and the idea of marketing the meeting seemed to escape them until we demonstrated how it could be done effectively. Given the location and publishing economy, they were praying for 400 attendees. They got about 535 including some walk-ins which still amazes me. Lost people from the lost tribe?
Anyway, please ask other questions --
My best,
Greg
Gregory M. Britton Publisher | Getty Publications 1200 Getty Center Drive | Suite 500 Los Angeles, CA 90049 (T) 310 440 6066 | gbritton@getty.edu www.gettypublications.org
-- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [x] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
-- -- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
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