At lunch today, I visited one of the hotels on my list. It rose to the top based on some feedback via the Facebook group. The hotel is certainly large enough to hold Hearthingstone for the foreseeable future, with nearly 200 guest rooms, plenty of meeting space, and so on. It Read more…
I was looking around for my copy of the 2014 PLC program book. While I could’ve sworn I’d kept it, I can’t find it anywhere. Thankfully, the chair of that conference found a copy and sent it to me, for which I’m very grateful! While I don’t think it makes Read more…
When I started discussing Hearthingstone, one of the first pieces of advice I received from the chair of the 2014 PLC was to charge admission. I’d been planning to, but it’s very sound advice. Conferences have costs, and I do not have money burning a hole in my pocket. Aside Read more…
I’ve been whittling through a massive list of hotels and encountered a few interesting possibilities. First of all, after some careful review, the downtown hotels are just too damned expensive. For every hotel that I’ve considered, I tried to price a room with a king bed for the last weekend Read more…
I talked a little about this in another post, but it deserves a lot more thought. When to have the event is going to be very important. It will affect turnout, what kinds of sessions we can do, pricing, and how much time I have to prepare. If I’m collecting Read more…
One of the most important questions to answer for any conference is “where?”- not just the city, but more specifically the exact facility. As a metropolitan area with more than 2 million inhabitants, Austin has plenty of possible venues. The trick is narrowing down the list of possibilities and reaching Read more…
When running a conference, there’s a lot more to it than simply booking a hotel and a few meeting rooms. A well-run convention provides a great many things beyond a location. Obviously, programming is a huge concern. I touched on this in another post, but just knowing how many of Read more…
I live in a major metropolitan area (with three more within a few hours’ drive), but it’s no New York City. Our airport (AUS) is the 35th busiest in the US, which is something- but travel here will still likely be more expensive and difficult than to Las Vegas or Read more…
Hearthingstone is still nebulous- quasi-real in the way of things half-remembered, half-imagined. Part of the process of planning a convention is to more thoroughly lay out what you want it to be (or become). This is critical for scope and scale issues, such as locations and dates. For instance, if Read more…
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