General comments on WASPAA'97

Set down by Dan Ellis, 1997nov20

Comments from participants:

• provide forum for potential room-sharers to find one another
• provide forum for potential sharers of rides between the airport and Mohonk to find one another. Mohonk offers a pick-up service but it is exhorbitant for individuals
• shift some of the cost from the plain hotel bill to registration. For instance, we could up the registration by $100, and negotiate an equivalently lower rate with the hotel, on the understanding that we will give them $100 for each registrant. This might make it easier for certain participants to get their institutions to pay; often they have a maximum for hotel/food payments.
• provide a list of all participants (including non-presenters) with contact information. I'm considering putting this on the web retrospectively, but there are privacy concerns there. It would have been nicer to hand out a printed copy as part of the registration packet.
• Mark Kahrs suggests:

  There should be a list of talks prepared for each section (and a viewgraph made for each section). There should also be an introduction to the section and the speakers (to be made by the chair of the section).

AV hire

We've been using Sandy Margolin (SJ Margolin Sound, Lights...) for as long as I know. He is rather expensive (we paid $3500 all-in for his services last time), but the argument goes that we need top-flight audio equipment for this workshop. I don't think we can fault the audio presentation, but there were a couple of problems on the visual side this time. Most importantly, a couple of participants wanted to use PowerPoint slides directly from their PC, but we didn't have the capacity to provide video projection for computer output (only for TV-quality video tapes). Sandy said that if we had warned him earlier, he would have been able to get hold of the necessary equipment. Secondly, it seemed like the slide projector we had (some kind of mercury vapor device?) was not terribly sucessful - basically, not bright enough. I can't imagine that would happen again, but it's something to watch out for.

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