Necss 2010

[Reager]

You could go with a medium sized city. Manchester, NH for example has a couple fairly good sized conference centers, is usually cheaper to fly to than boston, has free parking, a good "strip" with plenty of good restaraunts.

It's not a big city, but you're not in the middle of nowhere either.

The major problem with holding the conference in other cities than New York is that the bulk of the organizers live in....New York! We're all volunteers and it's difficult enough to take a couple days of work to prepare for a conference taking place "in our backyard" so to speak. It would be another beast entirely to try and plan and execute everything remotely.

Another issue is that holding the conference in a more "out of the way" location means our speaker expenses may rise considerably. Right now we can take advantage of NY or northeast-based speakers without paying much in travel expenses. Holding the conference in a place that does not have a built-in speaker base or is not a major transportation hub changes things.

So, as always, it's a tough line to walk....

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

You could go with a medium sized city. Manchester, NH for example has a couple fairly good sized conference centers, is usually cheaper to fly to than boston, has free parking, a good "strip" with plenty of good restaraunts.

It's not a big city, but you're not in the middle of nowhere either.

Of course, it's kind of hard to generate the same level of excitement in Manchester, as it is in NYC.

 

[Sc00ter]

Of course, it's kind of hard to generate the same level of excitement in Manchester, as it is in NYC.

Hey, ManchVegas is a fun place.. Especially when you know where the illegal gambling is.

 

[seismic_cowgirl]

Somehow I think I'm going to regret asking this...

What's Scott's beef with paying for parking and public transportation... doesn't he know that's how you meet women... albeit fleetingly?



... been too busy trying to save the world to make it to NECSS though

 

[SkepticScott]

What's Scott's beef with paying for parking and public transportation... doesn't he know that's how you meet women... albeit fleetingly?

I'm used to living in the suburbs, and go to many gaming tournaments (which tend to be at hotels in the suburbs). Everything has a parking lot. I also don't like valet parking garages (which I find a lot of in NYC), where they're not responsible for any damage they may inflict on your car.

I think public transportation is inefficient with respect to wasting the users' time. Trains always seem to be late, subways are infrequent and the limited entrances just slow down the loading and unloading process. I do real-time systems, so I find that I'm very sensitive to schedules. In a hard real-time system being late is as bad as not working at all (and maybe even worse!), so that's colored my thinking. Think of all the hundreds of wasted person-minutes involved when a train arrives just 5 minutes late. We shouldn't have stopped halfway. Instead we should have spent the extra money to make an efficient, reliable public transit system.