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 [...]
‘It Sounds Like Fun’: I Beg to Differ
The reaction from friends and colleagues when I mentioned an upcoming trip to a conference in California speaks volumes about the gap between meeting professionals’ experience onsite and the way it’s perceived back home. It isn’t too big a leap from this particular tale to the perception of meetings as elaborate parties that has helped [...]
An Audacity of Scope: A Million Tons of Trash
Participants at the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC) conference in Pittsburgh last week adopted a big, audacious challenge. The gathering of 150 or so meeting professionals called for a million tons of trash (or a million metric tonnes, outside the United States) to be diverted or recycled from the meetings and events that take place [...]
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 Virtual (R)Evolution-Part 1
Part 1: A Recipe for Disaster Start out with a well-rounded, well-founded measure of enthusiasm for the latest virtual meeting technologies. Add a healthy dose of concern about climate change, with a dollop of unintended greenwashing. Factor in a preoccupation with cutting meeting costs to the bone, without pausing to consider what may be lost [...]
A Time to Renew
SAN DIEGO COUNTY—I spent much of the weekend in awe-inspiring company, attending the semi-annual meeting of the Concepts Worldwide Advisory Board (CAB). And, as it happened, not a moment too soon. Concepts is a company that formed 20 years ago, and has positioned itself as a world leader in the corner of our industry offering [...]
Learning to Fly Right
Imagine an industry that shows a cumulative net loss after decades of operation. Its main business model is a poster child for showing MBA students the strategies they should avoid at all costs. Imagine that this industry generates a large share of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Factor in that industry’s acute vulnerability [...]
Dinosaur Economics
The power of the Internet is partly about the unexpected connections that help people share knowledge and build community, often in ways that make services more affordable and environmentally friendly. In meetings, we’re just scratching the surface of what might be possible online. Not simply to try and replace live meetings with virtual ones, or [...]
“Water Where It Didn’t Used To Be”
The Arctic is changing so quickly that it’s become one of the many early warning systems for global climate change. Each year brings new reports of ice sheets breaking off into the sea, along with a mad scramble to plan shipping routes and resource development projects that would have been difficult or impossible a generation [...]
Content Keeps Meetings Afloat
Higher air fares, fewer flights, and rising supply costs are the new reality for conferences around the world. Live meetings will survive the crunch because there is still no more effective way for people to share ideas, knowledge, and solutions. But the future could hold Fewer live meetings Regional and local meetings filling the gaps [...]
