Those are all good points, Kara. I live in New Jersey, so the U.S. is certainly convenient for me. It was great to have solid representation from our non-U.S. members at IAMDA 2010, hopefully they’ll come again in 2011 even if it’s in the U.S. again.

Seems like we have a pretty strong contingent of members from western Europe.
If we go strictly by painting frequency, it should probably be Paris, since Patricio beats all of us combined.

It looks good Ben — I’m using it to post this reply. Thanks!

Benjamin,
If possible, it would be nice if the site recognized when it was being accessed via an iPhone or other mobile device, and served up the content in a mobile-friendly format. Buddypress says it can do that (http://buddypress.org/extend/plugins/), but I don’t know how much extra work it would be.

Something I’d like to see next time: Panel Discussions, where there’s a topic, a moderator and three or four panelists having a freewheling conversation about the topic. (Often the moderator is taking part in the discussion too.) At other events I’ve been to, the panel discussions are often the most lively and unpredictable parts of the program. For attendees, it means you get more points of view then you do from a single person delivering a presentation on a topic. Also, from the standpoint of accomodating everyone who’d like to present, it’s a way of giving more people a chance to participate within the finite hours of the conference (i.e., rather than a room being dedicated to one person’s presentation for an hour, you’re getting in 4 panelists.)

Presentation overlap is tough, but frankly, I’ve been to alot of events like this, and I’ve never been to one where there wasn’t overlap in the schedule. From a practical perspective, you want a lot of programming so that there’s variety and you’re covering the diverse interests of the attendees; but there are only so many hours in the day, so there’s got to be some overlap. Also, the flip side is that if there’s only one thing going on at a time, and you’re not interested in that particular thing, you’re kind of screwed. If the biggest problem at IAMDA conferences is, ”too many good things to choose from”, maybe that’s a good problem to have.

I’d like to see the presentation about printing posted. Lots of good info, but tough to absorb and take notes about it all.

I think Mia’s got a good point that getting to the point of having actionable tasks should probably be a priority. So I guess that raises the question, how do we get to that point? Take ”influencing K-12 education” — how do we take that from a broad goal to an actionable project? Do we organize a committee to come up with ideas? Or do we start by crowd-sourcing it — using this site to solicit seed ideas from the membership, then maybe letting a small, education-savvy committee pick the most promising (and practical) ideas for execution. Maybe we could have a discussion group to gather ideas for each of the big topics of interest — education, exhibition, 2011 conference, promoting the mobile medium, etc. And then form small committees to funnel that collection of seed ideas into actionable projects.