Shape of Things To Come

When I helped organize conferences previously (1980, 1985, 1995) there were few resources other than pencil, grid paper and a very large eraser.  By 1995, I had a personal computer, but there were very few tools for conference planning - in fact we had a registration program custom written for us to use.  But spread sheets were rare and we scheduled workshops and seminars the old-fashioned way.

This time?  Things have changed.

We also have more resources on the ground and are taking full advantage of them!

The Civic Centre can hold 500 (plus, but we need to reserve some seats for the vendors and guests) and we are planning as though we will fill all of those seats.

Registration will be done on line, which will take an enormous load off of the committee.  Instead of continually crunching numbers, the site will track registration, give us seat counts for the various events, and just generally make our life a whole lot simpler.

In addition, the site will collect the fees so we won't have to be trekking to the bank to make deposits and such, dealing with foreign currency, etc.

We have spent a good portion of the summer honing the schedule, selecting workshop and seminar topics we think will be of interest to people, scheduling the instructors into rooms at the various facilities.  We are renting workshop/seminar spaces at the art gallery, the library, the Civic Centre and the Coast Inn of the North.  The Courtyard Marriott will have the exhibit and one seminar room, plus some other smaller events, most likely the author signing and special interest groups who wish to meet.

The entry forms for the author signing, the fashion show and the general exhibits are being reviewed and should go up shortly.  With so many people out of town during the summer (some of them simply trying to avoid the pall of wildfire smoke), things got delayed a bit.

But the next meeting to finalize much of these things is Saturday, and hopefully the info on the exhibits and such will be posted to our website very soon.  (We'd rather everything was correct than rush and find out we've made errors!)

Personally I will be stepping back from the conference planning for a few months while I deal with personal deadlines, including (hopefully!) publishing The Intentional Weaver.  Once registration goes live it will be time to start sorting out the fine details and I will be back in the thick of it again.

But honestly?  A friend says that it is so much better to be able to say "I have done x" than to say "I will be doing x".  Yes, I'm looking forward to the conference being successfully complete...