What are your favorite past ESA meeting venues? Where would you like ESA to meet in future?
I feel like my own preferences make me a bit of an outlier among ESA members, although only a bit. I’m probably happier to go to the Midwest than the median ESA member. I’m also probably happier to go someplace really hot. As a Canadian, I need to feel uncomfortably hot for at least one week every summer. Otherwise I don’t feel like I had summer, I feel like I skipped straight from last winter to next winter. Finally, I definitely care more than the median ESA member about whether the city has a professional baseball team that I could go see. 🙂 Conversely, in other ways I’m a typical ESA member in terms of my meeting location preferences. I like good beer and and good food.
So here’s my own personal ranking of recent-ish ESA meeting venues:
Would love to return: Montreal, Austin, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New Orleans
Happy to return: Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Louisville, San Jose, Sacramento
Would rather not return: Portland, Ft. Lauderdale, Savannah, Tucson, Albuquerque, Spokane.
Omitted because ESA will never return: Snowbird. My impression is that ESA has far outgrown Snowbird’s capacity. So my (or anyone’s) preferences on returning to Snowbird are moot.
Where would you like to see ESA go in future? As a conversation starter, here are some suggestions, based on my own preferences plus perusal of Wikipedia’s list of US convention centers sorted by size. I doubt it’s practical for ESA to meet anywhere with a convention center much bigger, or much smaller, than the convention centers in which it’s met recently. We wouldn’t all fit in a small convention center, and can’t afford to rent a huge one. So much as I personally would enjoying meeting in NYC or Denver or Nashville, and as convenient as it would be for me to meet in Missoula, it ain’t happening.
Charlotte. I’m actually a little surprised ESA has never been there. It has a hub airport so it’s easy to get to. It’s hot in August so I presume it’d be cheap to rent. Am I missing something?
Kansas City. I was there for an American Fisheries Society conference a while back. AFS meets in many of the same places as ESA does.
Indianapolis. If memory serves, ESA actually was planning to meet there at one point, but had to change plans due to conflict with a major motor race that’s held in August every year. So I guess Indianapolis probably isn’t happening. But I decided to throw it out there anyway.
Seattle, Boston (Hynes Convention Center), Columbus OH, San Antonio, Cleveland. Would these convention centers be too big and expensive for ESA?
Greensboro? Raleigh? Des Moines? Cincinnati? Birmingham? Tampa? Grand Rapids? Knoxville? I don’t have much sense of what these cities are like, either from my own experience or from talking to others. But I figured I’d throw them out there for comments, as they all appear to have convention centers of an appropriate size, as best I can tell from Wikipedia.
Vancouver (for a joint ESA-CSEE meeting). I’m not sure if the Vancouver Convention Center is the right size, though?
Calgary (for a joint ESA-CSEE meeting). Calgary just built a new convention center. My understanding is that the old one is just a shade too small for the ESA meeting. But it sounds like the new one might be too big? Not sure, hopefully ESA will look into it sometime. Because then my friends could come over to my house and hang out on my back deck. 🙂
Ok, the floor is yours! Where would you like to see the ESA meeting return to, or go for the first time?
p.s. Perusing Wikipedia’s convention center capacity list, I was amused to discover that the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex in Harrisburg is about the right size, at least in terms of square footage. I grew up near there, and as a kid I used to go there every year for the Farm Show. The Farm Show complex is unsuitable for ESA, for various reasons. But seeing the Farm Show complex on the Wikipedia list brought back memories. 🙂
p.p.s. If there’s a city you were expecting me to suggest, that I didn’t suggest, it’s because either I think the city is boring, it doesn’t have a convention center of the right size, or both. But feel free to bring up other suggestions in the comments. You’re not just limited to talking about my suggestions!