Can a Value-Add be Free?
Recently a lot fingers have been doing a lot of typing regarding the Virtual Access Pass as proposed by Meeting Professionals International (MPI) for the upcoming World Education Congress (WEC). The dedication and earnest concern of the various bloggers should be commended, for this debate about using the Internet to extend the reach of conferences [...]
The Tempest Over MPI’s Virtual Access Pass
There’s quite a tempest brewing over the Virtual Access Pass that our professional association, Meeting Professionals International (MPI), has introduced for its 2009 World Education Congress (WEC), which gets under way this weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conversation is an echo of a wider debate about when it’s legitimate—or whether it’s ever legitimate—to [...]
Farewell Rick Redfern: A Revolution in Search of a Cash Flow
What would you do if Twitter stopped tweeting and YouTube suddenly went off the air? Particularly if you lived in a community where television outlets were consolidating, radio stations had cut local programming, and the venerable daily newspaper was on the verge of shutting down? No doubt, with Internet access and decent search skills, you [...]
The Green Meetings Portal Goes Live
The Green Meetings Portal went live earlier this week. Earlier this year, we announced that The Conference Publishers was joining with the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) to launch the world’s first conference content portal. I’m tremendously pleased and proud to announce that the promise is now, finally, a reality. The Portal begins life with [...]
What Are You Waiting For?
In 1968, while most of his classmates were playing ball or watching Gilligan’s Island or sleeping, one 13-year-old boy was programming his heart out on a powerful (for its day) mainframe computer. It was a unique and improbable opportunity and he took full advantage of it. Reflecting on the experience today, Bill Gates says, “I [...]
The Green Meetings Portal: A World First
PITTSBURGH – This week, our company marks an important and very exciting milestone. The Edge is a blog about conferences and content, not a promotional page for The Conference Publishers. But this is a moment when we’re generating industry news. And it has everything to do with the power of face-to-face meetings, the transcendent importance [...]
A Moment of Clarity
There was a quiet moment of realization that I took away from MPI’s MeetDifferent conference in Atlanta. One of the Monday morning breakouts was an Unconference session, where participants facilitated table conversations on the topics of their choice. As part of the coverage we were producing for MPI, I sat down at a table discussion [...]
First, Do No Harm
Some of the most transcendent moments I’ve seen onsite have taken place in carefully controlled settings, where every aspect of a meeting was engineered to get people talking to each other. And listening across the boundaries of language, culture, agenda, and organizational loyalties. As meeting professionals, we don’t often talk about the incredible convening power [...]
Downturn? What Downturn?
As a meeting professional, how would you have felt if you’d received the following RFP? Meeting dates: December 15-31 Scope: Nation-wide (United States only) Estimated participants: 50,400 Room nights: None Venues: 4,200 Average participants per venue: 12 Food and beverage: Provided Audio-visual requirements: None Air travel: None Carbon footprint: Local ground transportation; public transit and [...]
World AIDS Day and the Ultimate ROI
When it comes to assessing the return on investment (ROI) in large, face-to-face meetings, it’s hard to think of a more basic measure than 3.8 million years of life. With the approach of World AIDS Day December 1, the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative issued a verdict of sorts on the AIDS policies [...]
