‘A lot is

happening in Panama. The present administration has made a commitment to make Panama a center of international conferences.’

WHAT ASCE NEEDS While the Civil Engineering Conference is ASCE’s flagship event, attendance ranges from just 800 to 1,000 people — surprising for an organization with more than 140,000 members. But ASCE also has eight institutes serving specialty areas, including architectural engineering, construction, environ- mental and water resources, and transportation, and each institute has its own congress — some of them annual — that attracts a thousand or so attendees. So there’s a great deal of competition within the society for member attention. “We have lots of meetings,” Rushing said. “There’s about 20 or so events a year that either we’re hosting or we are partnering with other industries and societies throughout the world.” Until recently, the Civil Engineering Confer-

ence was held twice a year. But ASCE was looking to streamline and strengthen the event — “This is supposed to be where we bring all of the disci- plines together,” Rushing said, “to talk about the issues that face civil engineers as a whole” — and so merged the two meetings into one annual

conference. “We’re right now in the process of trying to retool what our annual is,” Rushing said.

“And in doing that, we’re looking at what is facing the civil engineers. What do they need to know?” When we talked to Rushing, it was a few

months after her first site visit to Panama City, and she was in contract negotiations for her 2014 ven- ues. ASCE doesn’t have a set type of meeting facil- ity it always uses. “I don’t think I have an ideal,” Rushing said. “We’re flexible. It really depends on the city and the venue, and what they have to offer.” She’s expecting a thousand to 1,500 attendees

at the 2014 conference, a group size that “can be contained in a large hotel,” she said, but “the challenging part is that not all of the hotels [in Panama] are that large.” Most likely ASCE will end up spread out among a few properties in down- town Panama City — “We want to make sure that our attendees get out and experience the city that we’re in, that they have an opportunity to go places and do things” — but as of press time that was still being nailed down.