I’m in town for the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education annual conference, and this place is rocking. Well, it’s always rocking, but add the Saints win on top of a growing Mardi Gras fever and the energy is amazing. Saints flags are flying from every car antenna, and a parade went by my window at the Marriott at the Convention Center a little while ago. I could more hear than see it (actually, I even felt the walls shake a bit with the drumbeats) so I’m not entirely sure what it was all about, but it was so very NOLA.

I’ll be mainly posting about the ACME meeting over at the Capsules blog for the next few days, but it just feels good to be back in the Big Easy. Plus it’s a whole lot warmer here than back home in the frozen Northeast!

Royal Caribbean is taking a lot of heat over its decision to continue to bring passengers to its private beach at Labadee, about 100 miles up the coast from earthquake-shattered Port-au-Prince. Never mind that it donated a million bucks to the relief efforts, and is bringing in aide and supplies along with passengers — to most, it may look like, as David Letterman, said, something only “idiot cruise ships” would do. But it’s not so simple to deride the decision if you look beyond the first gut reaction.

I think that Royal Caribbean is doing the best it can under horrible circumstances; it’s just that we’re all really uncomfortable about it. Personally, there’s no way I could sip a rum drink knowing about the devastation just down the coast — just as I couldn’t go enjoy being in New York for a long time after 9/11 or New Orleans while the worst of the post-Katrina nightmare was still going on. Being in close proximity to so much suffering precludes good times for most of us, even as the local NY and NOLA CVBs begged us to bring our tourist and meetings dollars to the area so business as somewhat usual can resume and people can have some sense of normalcy again (and a cash-flow source, of course). Haiti, of course, is not a major meetings or tourism destination in the same way New Orleans or New York are, but there are some parallels to be drawn.

Then there was this quote in a Miami Herald story a poster on the Miforum listserv pointed out:

Arthur Applbaum, a Harvard University professor of ethics and public policy, said that while it shows “moral sensitivity to be disturbed by the thought that one is vacationing on the beach when others are suffering nearby … it also shows insufficient moral reflection to think that proximity makes a moral difference.

“The people of Haiti are suffering whether you take your beach vacation in the Dominican Republic or in Hawaii,” he said, “and it is a failure of the moral imagination not to be equally troubled in Waikiki.”

I have a failure of moral imagination then, because to me, there is a difference — even if I can’t articulate what exactly it is. I still think RCCL is doing the best thing it can in a terrible situation: bringing continuity to the people who depend on its passengers for their livelihood, along with aide and funds. I just would not be able to stomach being one of the passengers, not now. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.

For a first-person account of what being a passenger on a recent stop in Labadee was like, check out this post: Cruise with a Purpose. Granted, coming from an executive with cruising company Seasite.com may give it a bit of a positive spin, but I have a feeling she speaks for how most of the passengers probably felt about the experience.

We all want people to be fully engaged in every moment of a live meeting or conference, but what can we reasonably expect of people going to a virtual event? That’s the question Steve Gogolak tackles in this post on A Wider Net. I was surprised to learn that, generally speaking, people hang out at a virtual event for two to three hours. He doesn’t say if they’re checking e-mail at the same time or are sticking just to the virtual event site, but either way, that’s a lot longer than I would have guessed.

More important, though, is the idea that virtual event organizers really stop to think about what they want people to get from the event, and how long they will need to linger there to get it. I believe a lot of us still, in our minds at least, equate online events with face-to-face meetings and set our expectations accordingly. But the level of engagement is different, the experience is different, and the interactions are different — and so should be our expectations.

Gotta love Chris Elliott for this one: Hotel fees that must die — and how to kill them. (I’m particularly fond of the “furniture fee.” Hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms before.) Read to the end for the most outrageous fee. I’m just waiting for the flush fee that keeps getting bandied about on some cut-rate airlines. Could that be coming to a hotel near you? These days, I’d say anything is possible.

Thanks to MeCo for the pointer!

Jeff’s at it again over at Midcourse corrections, putting out yet another great post. This one is his top 10 myths about adult learning at conferences. Commenters have added a few more; it’s starting to remind me of something I wrote ages ago: My top 10 reasons for bolting.

The funny thing is that a lot of the myths he’s busting aren’t really myths — I mean, does anyone actually think that learning can only occur while people are seated? Common sense says otherwise. I think that’s just a crowd-control thing we got pounded into us from kindergarten on and just don’t bother to change because, well, it’s practical to jam 2,000 people into a ballroom and have them sit quietly while someone yaps at them. It’s a lot harder, and likely a lot more expensive and labor-intensive, to create a learning environment that works for all the different types of learners represented among those 2k folks. So we don’t do it.

Ditto for several other of the “myths” he points to. I guess my follow-on question would be: What are 10 ways to combat the status quo and create better learning environments at our meetings? Keeping in mind, of course, that some of the most ardent fans of the status quo are likely your organization’s leadership and your attendees.

We all want ‘em, we all need ‘em: Here’s one planner’s top 10 cost-cutting tips. For a boatload more, check out our budget-buster special section. I also went to a good session on cost-cutting (one of those roundtable/brainstorming ones) that I hope to post something about soon. There were even a few ideas I hadn’t heard before, which is always great.

Remember last spring when Starwood Hotels accused Hilton of corporate espionage when two ex-Starwood executives Hilton hired allegedly used confidential Starwood information on Hilton’s behalf? The plot just thickened: Starwood: Hilton CEO condoned use of confidential information. This could get ugly. From the article:

n a 135-page document filed in federal court Thursday, Starwood claims [Hilton CEO Christopher] Nassetta and at least 43 other Hilton executives were personally involved in or were aware of and condoned the use of the confidential information that Starwood says was stolen by former executives Ross Klein and Amar Lalvani.

The filing also claims that Steven Goldman, Hilton’s head of global development and a key member of Nassetta’s senior management team, used Lalvani as a “corporate spy” while he was still at Starwood. Goldman personally recruited Lalvani, while Nassetta recruited Klein, the suit claims.

When I read this article in today’s Boston Globe, I couldn’t help but wonder if this may in fact be where associations are — or perhaps should be? — headed: The End of the Office and the Future of Work. The basic premise is that we’re moving away from the old business model (you get a job and work for a company that provides salary, benefits, etc.) and into one where jobs are chopped into pieces and fed to a growing army of freelancers. It’s fascinating stuff. But when you lose the old employment model, you also lose the security, the bennies, and the sense of belonging to a community of sorts. From the article:

But to provide a greater level of stability freelance workers may require a new kind of institutional ally. Malone predicts that the growth in freelance work will necessitate a different breed of labor union to provide some of the benefits the employer now offers. Today’s unions are largely defined by their role in collective bargaining - negotiating with employers for better benefits, conditions, and pay. But many early unions actually arose in industries like construction or the garment trade where workers didn’t work for the same employer for very long, so the longstanding relationship wasn’t with the employer but the union.

These unions were more like guilds: organizations, united by a common set of specialized work skills, that combined elements of a social club and a mutual aid society. And rather than pressuring employers to provide benefits, they provided them directly. Malone argues that this sort of guild would be well-suited to a work landscape in which more workers are freelance. Such organizations might even see fit to offer income-smoothing insurance policies where freelancers can in good times pay into a fund that then helps them through leaner periods.

This sounds like a good fit for the association world to me. Of course, they’ll also be in the business of meetings. Freelancing can be tough on a lot of people due to the isolation of working remotely, or mostly solo, or both, so companies using freelancers, associations, and/or guilds will also likely include community-builders and ways for people to connect (i.e., meetings). More from the article:

Some of the online freelance companies try to tackle this. Most have online forums through which they try to recreate some of the dynamics of an actual workplace. iStockphoto goes further, organizing “iStockalypses” for select groups of its photographers: weeklong gatherings in exotic locales worldwide that are part party and part photo shoot. And iStockphoto photographers have begun organizing regional “Minilypses” on their own as a way to pool resources for photo shoots, to share information and simply to socialize.

Freelancers Union’s attempts to knit its members together socially are more conventional. Last month the organization held a holiday party in New York, and 150 or so people showed up. It was, says Horowitz, an enthusiastic crowd. “These people hadn’t been to a holiday party because they had been freelancing for years,” says Horowitz. “They want to feel connected, they want to feel that they’re part of something.”

At least that isn’t likely to change.

Update: A colleague just reminded me that we covered a similar idea in an article a few years ago, albeit from a more generational perspective: Associations Take Aim at Generation X. A key quote:

In the current service-driven economy, where workers are less likely to band together in the form of labor unions, “we’re going to find that associations are going to be a more common type of social capital building and a pretty indispensable resource for professionals,” [Arthur Brooks, PhD, associate professor of public administration and director of the Nonprofit Studies Program at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University] contends. “People might be hungry for a different source of community.”

He believes that associations are representative of the new “idea” economy. “We’re talking about the golden years of workplace-based social capital with associations smack in the middle of it.”

So what do you think? I like it, but wanted it to rock out a bit more. Still, good effort! (Total aside, but I’m going to miss outgoing PCMA chairman John Folks. He brought a real, genuine warmth to everything he touched on this year’s conference, from the general sessions to this video to remembering an interaction we had earlier this year when I saw him before the press conference. What a mixture of class act and overall great guy. I know Kati Quigley will bring her own special qualities and unique perspectives to the job, but she does have some big shoes to fill, IMHO.)

and I do love face-to-face meetings, one thing I’m not wild about is the opportunity to pick up germs from around the country, even around the world. I was so careful to wash my hands at every possible occasion while at PCMA this week, but I knew I was doomed as I started to feel a bit woozy while listening to Malcolm Gladwell (whose message was one we all should pay attention to right now: why we should look for humility in our leadership, not just intelligence, technological advancement, and all the other things that can lead to overconfidence. He was awesome, BTW). By the time I got to the airport, the fever was raging, and I’ve just been totally punky ever since.

To anyone I may have unknowingly infected in Dallas, my sincere apologies. Once I knew the disease was descending, I tried to keep to myself as much as possible. To whoever decided it was a good idea to mix and mingle at PCMA while you were feeling ill — on behalf of the rest of us, don’t do that again. Watch the Twitter stream, read the blog summaries, check out the Web TV and general session webcasts, but keep your participation, and your germs, virtual. To do otherwise is rude, nasty, and dangerous to the very people you’re looking to connect with.

Anyway, I’m still planning on catching up here on some of the rest of my PCMA experience as soon as I’m a bit more human again.