Hello!

The Northeast has a history of running great conferences where judges from across the region can meet, learn, and collaborate on a huge variety of topics. We’re obviously off to a slow start this year, but with your help, we would like to plan a similar set of high-quality events this year! This post serves as our call for proposals for our regional conferences for 2017.

Due to changes in judge conference support, we’re no longer limited to two events per calendar year. That means that we’re now able to run conferences that are better distributed around our region, to serve our judges from Maine to western New York and Pennsylvania to southern New Jersey and Delaware! I’d like to run one traditional “megaconference” later in the year, as well as a group of smaller regional conferences distributed around the region over the summer. Based on the OP schedule, we tentatively suggest the following scheduling windows:

* Weekend of June 25th, July 2nd, or July 16th: 3-5 Regional Conferences of 50-80 judges each, distributed around the region
* Weekend of September 10th, September 24th, October 15th, October 22nd, or October 29th: Mega-Conference, centrally located and supporting up to 200 attendees

The first possible date for either event is about 3 months out – and I recommend making sure you have at least 8-10 weeks lead time to plan your event, after submitting a proposal. We want to announce the Regional Conferences simultaneously, and potential attendees will want to know about the events at least 2 months out in order to keep their weekends free, and to make travel plans.

A Regional Conference is a good fit for a small venue supporting either one presentation room, or two concurrent presentation tracks. (Denser areas, especially along the northeast corridor, will likely need two concurrent presentation tracks.) The Mega-Conference needs either a conference center or a university able to support 200 attendees, across 4 to 6 presentation tracks, with additional space for admin tasks, L1/L2 testing, and small group sessions like Judge Calls Live. All proposals will benefit from access to technology like projectors, microphones, and Wi-Fi, and of course, convenient parking and lunch.

We’re open to venue suggestions, and ideally those would come with a volunteer organizer. I can’t be everywhere at once, so on-site volunteers are essential – but we’re happy to support first-time organizers in any way we can, including with tools developed and lessons learned from our past conferences.

Conference foil support will be available for attendees, presenters, and organizers at approved events. Additional information for attendees – including attendance and foil policies and a call for presenters – will be announced at a later date.

Interested organizers should contact us at ne.conference.coordinator@gmail.com. There is no deadline, but proposals will be evaluated and accepted on a rolling basis. Keep in mind that the sooner we are able to decide on proposed venues, the more time you will have to plan for your event. Proposals should include:

* Venue location and details, including room sizes
* Travel considerations, including availability of parking and food
* Technology considerations, including availability of projectors, microphones, or wi-fi
* Proposed dates where the venue is known to be available
* Proposed organizers (must be able to attend the event on the planned date, we recommend 2 for a regional conference, 3 for a mega-conference)
* Any other information that will help us make effective decisions

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by email, FB messenger, Slack, or IRC. I look forward to hearing from you!

—
Dan Collins