Re: COMMON Conference locations.

Jim,

 New Jersey has quite a few hotels / convention centers.

 -mark


At 7/14/05 12:00 PM, you wrote:

<snip>
So, anyway, now that COMMON attendance is down, I wonder if it would be
possible to have COMMON in an interesting location. Orlando and Anaheim
have to be two of the blandest cities around. NOLA is always
interesting, but it's old hat. Miami may be interesting though.
</snip>

OK, this is a question that the COMMON board and many of the rest of us
have been struggling with.

Definition:  Destination City:  A city that has several thousand hotel
rooms within reasonable walking distance of a massive convention center,
IE:  Las Vegas, Orlando, New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, New York,
Chicago etc..  These cities have a significant draw, but are expensive to
stay in.

We now have come to an attendance level at COMMON where many cities outside
of the "Destination Cities" criteria that has been used in the past to
determine where to go is no longer valid.  We don't need as many meeting
rooms and hotel rooms as we used to, so cities like (duck and run)
Milwaukee, WI, Grand Rapids, MI, and many others can now support COMMON
where once before they could not.  Even the NAACP is in Milwaukee this
week.

So, the question is:  Where should we look to put the conferences in the
near future?  The contracts for the convention centers do not run out as
far as they used to, so there is some flexibility in planning.

Please speak up.  Contact me privately if you do not want to use the list.

BTW:  if you are a COMMON member, and have not yet voted in the COMMON
board election, please do so.  The end of the voting is tomorrow.
There are five candidates for the board: myself, Larry Bolhuis, Beverly
Russell,  Bruce Collins, and Leo Lefebvre.  Please vote for three.

Jim Oberholtzer