I’m dealing with issues of time and space. No, I haven’t decided to take up a career as an astrophysicist. It’s all part of planning the PCMA 2011 Convening Leaders annual meeting.
The meeting’s schedule of events is the time part (and there’s not enough of it), and its room locations and set-ups are the space part (and there’s either too much or not enough of that). Each year, we start with a basic schedule of
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events, and, like many of your own meetings, the schedule is based on what has worked well in the past.Typically, I develop this schedule in a matrix, picture-type format, organized by day and time. Sounds easy enough, right? It is, until it gets shared with thePCMAstaff team and someone inevitably wants to add events, length- en the time of existing programs, or change the day and/or time of a meeting. Programs and activities begin to overlap, and the next thing you know, the schedule that once was so neat and organized is now on the messy side. When this happens—and it does every year—we handle it by asking a few simple questions: What is our main priority? ForPCMA,
education and networking drive our Convening Leaders program, so everything must revolve around the attendee’s experiences in these areas. For example, at 2010’s Convening Leaders in Dallas, our education team asked us to extend the first full-attendee refreshment breakon Monday—the first full day of the meeting— by 15 minutes because this was a key network- ing opportunity. That worked out very well, and we will do it again in 2011. Because some of the best opportunities to learn from each other take place informally in the hallways, the timing for our refreshment breaks is critical. Howmany people will be affected by a
schedule or programming change? Obviously, we strive to affect the fewest attendees possible.
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swework on putting together Convening Leaders, we enter a time and space continuum.
This year, we are working through some pre- conference scheduling issues such as the timing of our Hospitality Helping Hands off-site com- munity-service event, our headquarters commit- tee meetings, and our Convening Leaders orien- tation program. It’s important that these three activities do not overlap in the schedule, so an attendee is able to participate in all three.With some discussion about our priorities and num- ber of attendees for each program, we were able to adjust the schedule accordingly. When it comes to meeting space for the
upcoming Convening Leaders, we’re challenged like never before. I mentioned inmyMay col- umn that we have the daunting task of shrinking the 16,000-person Grand Garden Arena at the MGMGrand to a general session setting for 3,000. Aside from draping off unnecessary seats, how can we use the space in an innovative way to show other planners how they might tackle a similar challenge? Because education and net- working drive our program, we’ve decided to combine the two elements and create a Learning Lounge on the floor of the arena that will be open for education and networking just prior to the general sessions.We’re still working out the details, but we envision a place for attendee- driven content, casual conversations, and small theater-type sessions. By utilizing two-thirds of the arena floor space, we’re able to use the remaining one-third at the end of the arena for the general-session stage and attendee seating. When I think about it, our time and space
challenges stem from having so many vital com- ponents to thePCMAConvening Leaders pro- gram. And in that way, we are most fortunate.
GETTING SPACEY: In addition to our gen- eral-session space challenge, we are co- locating with the Virtual Edge Summit program in 2011. Therefore, we are con- solidating and sharing some education-ses- sion space to be used for virtual- and hybrid- event education on Wednesday, Jan. 13, and Thursday, Jan. 14. You could say we’re working on creating physical space in order for our atten- dees to learn about virtual space.
I hope you make plans to join us this Jan. 9–12 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Registration is now open atwww.pcma 2011.org.
Kelly Peacy, CAE, CMP Vice President of Meetings and Events kpeacy@pcma.org