J5’s Blog

I have to admit I am very impressed with MIT’s setup for conferences.  Though you do tend to get bounced from department to department the truth is most of it is a turn key operation with third parties waiting in the wing to help you out with the extras.  Internet and A/V were already setup in the space we got.  The doors were unlocked and the cleaning crew comes in the morning to clean up the common area.  All of this comes for free because MIT gets it.  They understand that conferences bring a wide variety of educational experiences and are great places for collaboration for students and for industry.  It also creates a great ecosystem for local businesses who’s services are available at moments notice.  There are a few caveats however with holding a conference here:

First, conferences can only be organized by MIT departments.  This means you need to have contacts with MIT people who are enthusiastic about your conference.  Luckily we have held the summit here in the past and the Media Lab has always been very helpful getting us space.  I would like to thank Walter Bender for getting me in touch with Henry Holtzman and Steve Pomeroy.  Henry got the ball rolling and got us the booking while Steve, who is attending the conference, did all the leg work and has been invaluable with last minute prep work like making and printing out signs.

Second, the MIT campus is a large collection of buildings forming a quite intimidating maze.  Even with a link to a map a lot of people got a bit lost.  I even got lost as the reservation says Sloan but the building is actually one of the Sloan buildings which all have different names.

Third it isn’t always clear what extra services one needs to acquire.  I was running around looking for a way to rent tables.  As it turned out there were already tables in the hallway which was sufficient for what we needed.

There are a number of other minor things I have learned I need to look into when organizing conference space.  If asked to do so again I will now have a better idea of what needs to be thought of in advance.  Luckily my first conference was at MIT so the major stuff was already covered without much fanfare.  For future reference (for others and as a link for myself) MIT has a helpful event planning guide.