Conference planning and prep meetings

Conference planners hard at work...

... and deep in thought.

Assembling the conference program.

Preparing name badges for registration.

Preparing opportunity drawing ticket bags.

Creating time cards.

What worked well

• Agendas. Since there is so much ground to cover and it is easy to get side-tracked, we found it important to create pre-planned agendas. Here are the Spring 2007 planning meeting agendas: 4/9 4/16 4/13 4/30 5/7 5/14 6/04

• When meetings got off topic or out of control, one of the event chairs blew a harmonica to indicate that the meeting should come back to order.

Suggestions for improvement

• Our planning meetings always went way over time, sometimes extending to nearly 4 hours. It may be wise to set strict limits on the time alotted to discussion of each area of responsibility, with additional discussion taking place after the meeting or in breakout sessions. In addition, it is essential to ensure that the meeting does not go off track on tangential subjects.
• Our meeting format was essentially to go down the list of responsibilities, call for a report from each, and then invite discussion. An alternate structure which requires more discipline but which may be more effective is: (1) Begin the meeting with a very brief report from each area of responsibility, combined with questions/instructions from the event chairs. (2) Break out to one hour of individualized sessions. Teams meet with one another and can roam the room with questions/instructions for other teams, the contest chairs, the DG, the LGET, etc. (3) Call the joint meeting back to order and review action items for each team.
• Don't revisit items that have already been discussed -- e.g., don't review the whole conference schedule or hotel layout once per meeting. Review the changes only.
• Record meeting minutes in a blog.