Here’s a great story about how Boston is training formerly homeless people to fill entry-level jobs in hotels. From the article:

“The START curriculum is very concise and includes preparation for many different positions, which enables us to offer our clients a choice of jobs they may be interested in,” explained Serena Powell, executive director of Community Work Services. “We represent people with a diverse set of challenges and barriers. Some are homeless and college educated, while others are homeless and learning disabled. START offers a range of jobs to meet different ability levels.”

Powell added that the program’s structure, testing component, and AH&LA credential were other important considerations.

“It was an easy sell to the hotels—we got a resounding ‘Yes!’ when we presented the program to them,” she said. Participating properties include the Bulfinch Hotel, Hampton Inn & Suites, Holiday Inn Express, Park Plaza, Ritz Carlton, Royal Sonesta, Shawmut Inn, Fairmont Copley Plaza, and the Westin.

How’s it working?

S. Nicholas Kriketos II, director of guest services at the Ritz-Carlton, called the At Your Service graduates hired by the hotel “true service professionals.”

“The ladies and gentlemen we have selected from Community Work Services have met and exceeded all of our expectations,” he said.

Granted, we didn’t get very many responses to this poll on how organizations reward their meetings professionals, but what results we did get I found a tad depressing. Thirty-three percent said their organization doesn’t reward meetings professionals at all, while 19 percent said thanks with cash. Fourteen percent said they were rewarded with either gift certificates/merchandise, some form of recognition, or work/life benefits.

Not so ironically, no one said they were rewarded with travel! Guess you guys do enough of that for your job that it would seem more like work than pleasure, or so management thinks. Interesting.

And check out this week’s poll, which is about the House voting to restore spousal business travel deductions. Will it make a difference in your room blocks? Vote here.

Worms are a wonderful thing, as South Africa’s Mount Nelson hotel has discovered. The hotel has added a worm farm where the wrigglers eat up the organic waste from the kitchen, resulting in a lovely “worm tea” that it uses to fertilize the historic property’s gardens. While they’re only currently processing 20 percent of their organic waste, the hotel hopes to bring that up to 100 percent soon, and to spread the idea. From CNN:

“If we think really big … if everybody took their organic waste and processed it through vermiculture or worm farms and we stopped organic waste going to landfill sites, it would have a dramatic impact on climate change.” [says environmental activist Mary Murphy]

“It’s incredible. They reduce waste by 70 percent (and) there is no smell here,” she says, wearing an “I dig worms” T-shirt and surrounded by thousands of the munching critters.

The worms neutralize harmful bacteria, such as Ecoli, and produce beneficial bacteria while increasing the levels of nitrogen and potassium in the soil — elements that help vegetables grow.

So, sometimes it’s OK to think inside the [worm] box, eh? I absolutely love this idea.

Here’s a free tech support site, brought to you by UNLV professor Patti Shock, via the MeCo listserv.

Thanks, Patti!

Some people say that live meetings are going to go the way of the Dodo bird, but not at the U.S. Department of Defense. “The Pentagon sent 36,000 military and civil service employees to 6,600 conferences worldwide last year at an average cost of $2,200 per person. ‘Of interest is that of those 6,600 conferences, 663 were held in Florida in the middle of the winter; 224 were held in Las Vegas, and 98 in Hawaii,’ said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in this Washington Post article. So, he’s looking to rein in expenses by limiting conference-related expenditures to $70 million next year.

While I can understand that it’s important to go to conferences in Hawaii, where the U.S. Pacific Command is headquartered, and Vegas and Florida are big meeting sites for everyone, but this bit at the end of the article gave me pause:

Among the meetings that received Pentagon support last year were the Armed Forces Bowling Conference in Orlando, the Bowling Managers Expo in Las Vegas, the Armed Forces Golf Conference in West Palm Beach, and the Craft and Hobby Association conference in Atlanta, according to the briefing paper.

OK, I won’t go there. But Ken Molay of the Webinar Blog makes a good point when he says:

Can webinars and web conferences really replace in-person affinity shows? I doubt it. They are built to do different things, and you can’t make connections and press the flesh with other attendees when you attend an online event. But on the other hand, some percentage of the information communicated at all these events must be just as effective when delivered over the web. Perhaps organizers could start reducing the total length and number of topic tracks in their conference sessions to reduce the number of people needed for effective coverage and the length of time they have to be present. They could then supplement the live show with web-based sessions to deliver content in a more economical manner.

I just saw an interesting post on the Soflow Creative Forum (subscription req’d) that made me think. The poster posited:

There will always be the mediocre guy, right? The one with half-baked ideas and weak weltanschauung that invariably invites the roll of the eyes or the sailing of the palm over the head indicating “clueless”.

Does mediocrity play an important part by showing/reminding creatives “where not to go”? He’s the fall guy, the brunt of endless humor, the targeted laugh of the day.

Where would we be without the guy who does the boring stuff, the tedious busy work that no one wants to get stuck with?

Or where would we be without the lukewarm work of someone else?

If we were all instense, amazing, prolific and wonderful artists, then what?

Meeting planning to me seems like a mix of the creative and the prosaic—at least on the surface. But even the most prosaic parts, say, registration or bag-stuffing, also has lots of room for creativity (I was so proud of myself for coming up with a better way to stuff bags at our first annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Planners Forum). Is there a place in meeting planning for mediocrity, if for no other reason than to make the stars shine brighter? I understand the need for the “workhorses” who just get it done, but I’d argue that there really isn’t.

But I was surprised at the answers the original poster got, which ranged from “mediocrity is just a matter of semantics” to “in some organizations, it’s better to be ‘in the safe zone’ of mediocrity than to stick your neck out to try something different.” Is that why so many meetings are mediocre, because planners are afraid to step out of the safe zone for fear that the neck that sticks out gets chopped? Or is it just inertia, the “we’ve always done it that way so why mess with success” syndrome?

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia build, edited, and updated by pretty much anyone who wants to be involved, held its Wikimania 2006 at Harvard last week, and from at least one account, it was a much more professionial gathering than last year’s inaugural event in a youth hostel in Frankfurt, Germany. For one thing, they actually paid the conference organizer! And they had corporate sponsors, including Amazon and Nokia. But it sounds like the conference, like Wikipedia itself, is still a work in progress. From the New York Times:

One member of the foundation’s board, Florence Nibart-Devouard, stormed out of a news conference because she had not been told about the announcement being made. And on Thursday afternoon, signs concerning registration had the opening time crossed out, replaced by the word “later.”

“It’s a funny thing,” Mr. Wales said. “I had no idea that anyone was putting up signs. Someone somewhere said there should be signs, and someone did it. It’s effective.”

“But,” he added, “it’s chaotic.”

Perhaps it should be, given the nature of the organization itself. Shouldn’t a meeting reflect the mores, nature, and ways of doing things of the organization? If active Wikipedia members like the rough-and-tumble, shouldn’t their conference be open to editing on the fly as well?