[LTER-asm2015committee] Summary of our July Program Committee Call

[John Vande Castle]

Thanks to everybody able to contribute to our call yesterday.  I think 
we are pretty much set for the upcoming deadlines.
It looks like we are up to about 400 attendees, which is OK with all the 
deadlines 2 weeks out. It is amazing how many people wait until the last 
week/day/hour for this.  Its also amazing how many people will wait for 
"late registration" and not save $25  (yes, that is trial compared to 
most meetings...).

I will be sending out a "2 week warning" to all-lter tomorrow or Friday 
and follow that up with a "2 day" warning at the end of the month.

If I missed anything or if you have something to add/comment on, simply 
reply to this message and it will go to the committee.

After the deadline (July 31) The poster committee will need to review 
posters for anything odd, and to check that student posters are actually 
attributed to STUDENT lead authors.

The working group committee will have to review all the requests and see 
if there is anything clearly duplicate, or conflicting in the same 
session.  We will also have to see if people don't self-organize well 
and have too many working groups in one session, and suggest moves, 
particularly to Wednesday which is currently under-subscribed.  I can 
review these based on past meetings and suggest things to the 
subcommittee too.

Committee members will make sure our speakers are "comfortable" and 
will introduce them for their plenary:
Kate and Rich will tag-team introducing Knute.
Hugh will introduce Diane
Theresa will introduce Ned
Peter will introduce Olds - or the NSF person who will introduce him...

For "closing night" we decided to have a number of options open for 
people to do:

The students will put together a "Trivia contest".  They can finalized 
questions and organize what they want to do at the meeting, or before. 
We will put up sign-up sheets for "teams" to compete - we can encourage 
"site teams" to see which site is the most trivial.

The trivia contest can feed directly to an "Open Mic" for people to do 
site skits or whatever - We will announce this just after the July 
deadlines and have sign-up sheets in the foyer for people to reserve a 
spot and say what they are going to do and who is going to lead the 
"activity"

At some point we will have an "Awards ceremony" for the Site "Lightening 
Round" winner, and student poster awards, trivia contest winners etc.

After the awards or  "Open Mic", the floor will be open to anybody 
wanting to join in a jam session.  We will also announce this ahead of 
time for interested people to bring instruments - and of course they are 
free to "practice" ahead of time during the meeting.

We will set up as best we can, some "sports activities" perhaps 2 
volleyball nets and a basketball "free throw" competition.  Again we 
will put up sign-up sheets in the foyer for people to list their "teams".

I will also add this information to the ASM web page.

Concurrent with all this, we will try to have "game night" running, with 
cards, board games or whatever we can find at the Y, set up at tables 
scattered around the rooom.

We will be flexible with all these activities, since as Theresa pointed 
out, what people will really be interested in the last night is to 
socialize - well, and drink beer/wine...

Photo Contest:
We will announce a photo contest - Before NOON on Wednesday, people will 
be free to upload pictures into the various "Photo Categories" of the 
ASM web page.  We will have a slide show running Wednesday night. 
Everybody will get "ballots" at registration with a vote for each 
category, and we will collect them in a box before the "awards ceremony" 
and winners will get a prize.

For student posters, the committee wanted more awards.  So in addition 
to just a first place and 4 runner ups (with $100 and 4x $50 or 
something prizes), we will have at least 5  - or more "Honorable 
mention"  These can be decided when we see the voting results - Grizelle 
and JVC will tally the judging sheets before the Wed evening mixer.

It turns out, that so far SG hasn't been capturing information on people 
who are will to be judges for the student poster session that we thought 
was happening.  We will try to get this added, and send out an email to 
people who have registered so far, to indicate if they would like to be 
judges.  We need to know ahead of time about how many judges we will 
have in order to decide how many posters/judge are needed and how many 
"judge" packets to make up.  Perhaps we can add a sign-up list on the 
ASM page for this as well.

  -jvc