At 09:10 AM 8/28/01 -0700, Art Bahrs wrote:
>Hi Denys :)
>    ok... so where is next year's Interex?  (I still say change the name
>back! hehe)

HPWorld 2002 is Sept 9-13 and will be held in the new, Los Angeles
Convention Center.  The conference will also include the Interworks
program so it will indeed use even more space.  As I understand it,
we have 1 end of the conference center with all the break-out rooms
located in close proximity to each other as well as everything else.

Some of you may recall, that this year's conference experienced a
last-minute change.  It originally was scheduled to take place in
May of this year.  It was changed after other bookings were made
for McCormick back to August and as such, did not get an ideal set
of breakout rooms due to having to reschedule it.  One thing that
the conference team tried very hard to achieve this year was to try
and group all presentations for a track in the same general area so
if you were going from say a UNIX talk to an MPE talk, you would go
to the rooms in the same area.  It is hoped that this helped out,
in terms of knowing where to go.

In terms of the signage in the conference center, this was
limited by the convention center mgmt itself although Interex indeed
wanted to place more signs to help people navigate their way.
I personally found the maps provided by the convention center
mgmt very confusing such that I felt it easier to walk around
and look than try to decipher their maps.  Having recently
lost my wristwatch, I was also quite disappointed that no where
did I see any clocks in the facility!

As you may be aware, conference space is booked several years in
advance.  Given the trend in recent years for the increase in
attendance, the Navy Pier simply would not accommodate the projected
number of attendees as well as exhibit space.  At the time this
decision was made, no one could have foreseen the lower attendance
that occurred, probably due to some of the things Denys' outlined.
If indeed we had the 12,000-13,000 attendees as forecasted 2+ years
ago, we would have been very crowded at Navy Pier.  But when you
take the lower attendance that occurred, we were swallowed-up by
the expansive size of the McCormick complex.  (I can remember being
just in the lakeside building (before the south complex was built)
at the old NCS show (predates Comdex I believe), with a 100,000
others.)

Each facility seems to have its issues.  When we were at the Navy Pier,
feedback from attendees indicated that the distances there and the
walking from the shuttle drop-off to the conference floor was way to
long.  At McCormick, the problem was the space for the keynote was
in the lakeside building and not the newer building as the other
part had previously been reserved and was being setup for the
vendor area for the next show.  Having been backstage in the area
where the keynotes/openings were held, almost the same amount of
space used for chairs upfront, was used to house all the equipment
and other things used to manage the sound, slides, lighting, etc.
What wasn't used this year was the camera display on the large
screens, which would have required even more space.  So indeed, this
part of the conference does need a large space.

Whenever you start looking at facilities for large groups, finding
facilities that have the best, ideal physical layout that compliments
the program is extremely difficult.  Consider some of the major
conferences such as Comdex, which require multiple facilities to
house not only the various talks, but also all the exhibit space
needs.

Other than the long walk between keynote and breakouts and other
issues with the facilities, I'm interested in hearing what folks
thought about the overall program content and the starting on Monday
AM instead of Sunday.  Sure, there will be the usual feedback in
terms of conflicts between talks scheduled at the same time, as well
as SIGs, but unless everything is done serially, this will always
occur even though every effort is make to try and prevent glaring
problems.

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