The gate at the Arlington Street entrance to Boston Public Garden. Photo by David Fox.

In January I’ll be in Boston for PCMA’s Convening Leaders 2014 program, and I’m really glad about that. When something like yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombing happens, all anyone really wants is to help — to give blood, to donate money, to send thoughts and prayers and love. To let the people whose city has been torn apart know that they’re not alone and never will be.

And sometimes you just want to be there. Or I do. I want to go and bear witness, and let my physical presence suggest something too important for words. Sometimes that’s the best thing to do — in the days and years after a tragedy, to find ways to reassure people that you haven’t forgotten them or what they’ve been through, and show them that your attention and your interest are theirs, for whatever comfort they might provide.

So I’m thinking about Boston and its people right now, as we all are. And in just nine months, four thousand meeting professionals will go there for PCMA’s annual meeting, and if I know our industry, the result will be something like the world’s biggest, tightest, most heartfelt group hug. I wouldn’t miss it.

Travel and tourism professionals prepare to meet with their members of Congress at Destination: Capitol Hill.

Following up on Barbara’s post about the U.S. Travel Association’s Destination: Capitol Hill lobbying event last week — I attended the first day of the program, which consisted of a briefing at the Park Hyatt Washington D.C. on Wednesday afternoon. It was well-attended and high-energy, and all business: talking points were reinforced, schedules were synchronized, and spirits were rallied. Everyone seemed more excited about meeting with their legislators than they were angry at them for living inside the Beltway, more proud of the travel industry and its contributions to the economy than they were defensive about past slights against it.

I’ve written before about how I think that, even as the meetings and travel industry did the vital work of rallying professionals against the tide of the AIG Effect, it clung to its injured pride for a few moments too long. (I’ve also written about my own prickliness when it came to last year’s GSA scandal. So, you know, let he who is without sin cast the first self-righteous tweet.) Continue reading →

Mary Byers was in Washington, D.C., last Friday afternoon, speaking about her new book, Road to Relevance: 5 Strategies for Competitive Associations, at an Executive Briefing program sponsored by Affinity Center International and Experient, and Convene was lucky enough to get an invitation. So there I was, one of a few dozen association professionals sitting in small groups in a quiet meeting room at the Grand Hyatt Washington, while Byers presented key insights from Road to Relevance, which she and co-author Harrison Coerver intend as companion to their previous collaboration, Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations.

An overarching theme of the new book — as its subtitle makes clear — is that associations must think of themselves, make decisions, and act as competitive organizations. Which, Byers noted on Friday, is not something that every association is comfortable with. She and Coerver write: “In the past, most associations played in their own sandboxes with little competition. That competition-free environment is gone. The number of associations serving industries and professions has grown dramatically, resulting in increased association versus association competition. Competition from the for-profit sector has increased for virtually every association offering, from publications to trade shows to educational programs.” Continue reading →

A chapter from The Hershey Story, in which a young caramel-maker named Milton Hershey discovers his one true destiny.

We may have a contender for single greatest contribution to human welfare by meetings and conventions: the great American chocolate bar. My family spent Easter weekend in Hershey, Pa., and yesterday morning we visited the Hershey Story museum, which counts among its many interesting exhibits the original machines that Milton Hershey used to launch his chocolate-making empire — a melangeur and a finisher manufactured by J.M. Lehmann Company.

And where did Hershey buy them? At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. From the 1893 World’s Fair Blog:

Milton Hershey, a successful Carmel candy maker, was looking to make some big changes to his company, Lancaster Caramel Company, in the 1880′s. These changes included potentially moving his company from Pennsylvania to Chicago, IL, the fastest growing region of the United States at the time. Ultimately Hershey kept his business in Pennsylvania, but Chicago would greatly influence his company.  It was at the 1893 Columbian Exposition where Hershey fell in love with the chocolate making methods of the Germans. It is said that he bought two pieces of equipment on the spot.

Upon returning to Lancaster, Pa., Hershey set up the machines, established the Hershey Chocolate Company, and, through much trial and error, crafted the recipe for his iconic milk chocolate, which was introduced in 1900 — the same year that Hershey sold the Lancaster Caramel Company. So, if you can’t imagine a world without Hershey Bars, Hershey Kisses, Hershey’s Syrup, Hershey’s Cocoa powder, and a bunch of things you might not realize are made by Hershey (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, York Peppermint Patties, Twizzlers, etc.), thank the Columbian Exposition and the people who organized it.

On behalf of whom I’m pleased, but not actually authorized, to say: You’re most welcome.

A week or so ago our chief Michelle Russell wrote about an app that prompted South by Southwest organizers to issue a cease-and-desist order because the app — which anonymously matched Facebook friends looking to hook up during the Austin festival — was making unauthorized use of “SXSW” in its URL. Michelle wrote: “It made me wonder if meeting organizers should be keeping an eye out for unauthorized app providers, who seek to capitalize in some way on their attendee base.”

Likewise, to what extent are planners responsible for unsavory behavior by attendees during and around a meeting? And/or when it happens online? And/or when it reflects a strain of an industry’s culture that has been observed and remarked upon previously? I’ve been thinking about all of this as I’ve watched the case of Adria Richards play out over the last two weeks. Richards, a technology evangelist, was attending the PyCon 2013 programming conference on March 17 when she overheard two men sitting behind her in the audience making sexual jokes; so she took a picture of them and tweeted it, and followed that up with tweets to PyCon’s staff and links to the conference’s code of conduct. (Read Richards’ blog post about the incident here.) In the ensuing firestorm, one of the men got fired, Richards was the subject of an online campaign of rape and death threats, her company’s website came under attack, and Richards herself got fired.

The situation is truly disturbing, for a few different reasons. Here’s an article from The Daily Dot, which covers the web like a community newspaper, that delineates how the whole thing “brought out the worst of the Internet”; and this Slate blog post by Valerie Aurora, executive director of the Ada Initiative, “a nonprofit supporting women in open technology and culture,” suggests that Richards’ actions brought out “the widespread hostility to women in her field, both online and offline.”

What happens when that sort of ugliness spills over into your meeting? Is it your job to police attendees and other participants — in the real world and online? Where does one attendee’s freedom of expression end and another attendee’s right to safety and comfort begin?

Meetings and conferences are how we start trying to fix things that are too big and nebulous for one person to handle. Like child sex abuse, which, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, was the subject of Penn State’s Child Sexual Abuse Conference on Traumatic Impact, Prevention, and Intervention — profiled by our own Katie Kervin in an excellent article in our January issue. “I think you have to get people talking about child sexual abuse,” Pamela Driftmier, Penn State’s director of conferences, told Katie. “So we provided a foundation in the basics…. We also haven’t as a society made it easy for people to talk about this, but we’re not going to change what’s happening if we avoid it.”

People looking to focus the conversation on youth sports also decided that a new conference was the way to go. Sponsored by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, Safe to Compete: Protecting Child Athletes From Sexual Abuse was an invitation-only summit held in Alexandria, Va., last week, with the goal of developing “sexual abuse prevention standards which can be applied across the entire youth sports industry. Participants will develop these standards through a series of dialogues about what is effective in current child sexual abuse prevention policies and what can be improved upon. Working together, we can make sure that every child has a place where it is safe to compete.”

How terrible that these conferences are necessary. And how reassuring that they’re being held.