I had a couple of meetings this week with Hal Bookbinder and Michael Brenner, my co-chairs for the IAJGS conference in 2014 in Salt Lake City. I met up with them at the Hilton for a tour of the facility, to refresh our memories from the 2007 conference held there. They were running late, so I joined them for lunch first. After the tour, we discussed many details and brainstormed quite a bit. Hal and Mike were the co-chairs for the 2007 conference, and I was involved as Resource Room coordinator, so we all have many things still relatively fresh in our minds from that conference.
We discussed asking some of the specific volunteers to step up again in their jobs because they did good the last time, and we discussed using different volunteers for some other things because of the things they had done since 2007. I learned a lot more about what goes on behind the scenes to plan a conference.
Some of the things we discussed, I responded with, “if all goes well with UJGS…” A few days earlier, UJGS had our first board meeting. Ever. All three of us. So my small board is now aware of our goal of pushing for more local membership and some of the ways we want to go about doing that. With our plans, hopefully we’ll have a few volunteers in our society who already have some of the contacts and experience to step into these conference supporting roles with almost no extra effort.
The next morning, we had a meeting at the Family History Library to let them know we were coming and to coordinate a few things with them.
It feels like a good start. I finally felt like I was included in the planning. We all seem to work together well and generally agree on things. I look forward to losing giving much of the next two years to the conference.