🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Sep28.152920.3299@bony1.uucp>, billg@bony1.uucp (Bill W. Gripp)
 writes:
> Why is the Spring DECUS always in the South (it seems to be usually
> Atlanta and occasionally New Orleans)?  

Let's see.  This is from memory, I think that the set of cities is correct 
but I may have a few of the years jumbled:

	84	Cincinnati	
	85	New Orleans
	86	Dallas
	87	Nashville
	88	Cincinnati
	89	Atlanta
	90	New Orleans
	91	Atlanta
	92	Atlanta
	93	Atlanta
	94	New Orleans

I guess you could say that it's usually been in the south in the last few
years.  (Note, a few of these dates may be mixed up.  It's hard to
remember that far back.  Let's see, where were LAVCs announced again? :-)

> If it has to be in the south
> there are other options.  What's wrong with ORLANDO, they have
> conventions there and DISNEY WORLD too =:^).  

A future Spring DECUS is pencilled in for Orlando, but it's far enough in
the future that I don't want to mention dates.  I expect that it would have
been done sooner except for lack of facilities -- see below.  

> How about Nashville or Dallas 

It's been done; see above.  Nashville, by the way, was not well-liked.  
Meeting facilities were barely adequate, and anyone who had to stay 
elsewhere than at the HQ hotel was WAY off in the boonies.  

> Then there's always New York

impossibly high room rates.  

> Boston 

Same comment as for Orlando, above.  Until the completion of their new
convention facilities, Boston won't/didn't have room for us.  

> or Cleveland =:^).  

> Toronto or Montreal would be nice.  I know,
> let's make it in Halifax so we can all get some really good LOX =:^}.

Um, this is the U.S. DECUS Symposium we're talking about.  The Canadian 
DECUS Chapter has its own national symposia, which you are free to attend.  

> Then there's the fall (winter?) DECUS.  Hey I like Anaheim (DISNEY LAND
> is great) but howabout San Diego, Seattle (nice town), Vancover BC,
> Denver or Salt Lake City once in a while?

Or SFO.  We were there in '86 and will be returning soon.  

In all these cases the answer is lack of available facilities -- in some cases
lack of facilities, period. We're pencilled in to return to San Diego (now that
the new convention center is open) in the future.  You'll hate the room rates,
though; this is a tourist town and the hotels don't need to give much of an
edge to convention-goers. 

> All this talk about ATLANTA as the only suitable site is really bogus.

No, it isn't.  

Although DECUS is only a medium-sized meeting in terms of numbers of attendees
(the winter Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas draws many tens of thousands; as
I was leaving Chicago one time I was told that the city was expecting over
100,000 for a farm machinery trade show), its facilities requirements are
pretty unusual.  We need one very large meeting room, several large meeting
rooms, plus other meeting rooms of various sizes, for about 15 program tracks
total, PLUS small meeting rooms for BOF meetings and the like, plus space for
the campgrounds, the Update.Daily room, the rooms needed by the audio taping
people, etc.  *And* we need space for the DEC exhibit hall. *And* we need space
to feed lunch to five to ten thousand people every day.  

And we need all of it relatively close together, with hotel rooms within
walking distance or at least a short bus ride away. 

Now, many convention facilities can provide some subset of this, but not all of
it all at once... and of those few that can, you can look a long, LONG way into
the future without finding a solid week in which all of it is un-booked.  (Oh,
and the exhibit hall setup begins in the preceding week, so we need that space
for a week and a half.)  

No one has mentioned Atlanta's good points:  We had more than enough room,
and it was all under one roof (a damned BIG roof; a slidewalk between the two
wings of the convention center would've come in handy!).  DEXPO was close at
hand, not miles away.  And the city offered some really good eating.  

Disclaimer:  I'm not on the Symposium Committee and don't speak for them.  I 
do, however, have some amount of experience putting much smaller conventions
into hotels, and when they tell me that "we have no choice at this time but to
go back to Atlanta", I know enough about this stuff to believe that this is 
quite plausible.  

	--- Jamie Hanrahan, Simpact Associates, San Diego CA
Chair, VMSnet [DECUS uucp] and Internals Working Groups, DECUS VAX Systems SIG 
Internet:  jeh@dcs.simpact.com, or if that fails, jeh@crash.cts.com
Uucp:  ...{crash,scubed,decwrl}!simpact!jeh