As Steve mentions we went on a site visit to the LA Convention Center last Thursday. It was a whirlwind trip, we flew in Thursday morning arriving at LAX around noon, spent about 4 hours at the convention center and flew back home the same day.
This will be the forth PDC that I've worked on. The first PDC that I worked on (in Denver) was working a booth for the Sitebuilder Network. The last three PDCs have been driven out of my immediate time so I've been "closer to the fire" as they say. Again this year I'll be driving the community stuff for the event both our online and offline activities.
Getting down to the convention center and performing the walk through brought back great memories of PDC 2003. What an amazing ride that was...
We've got a lot of work as a team ahead of us, we're in the ultra early stages. Lots of planning meetings, brainstorming and sync up meetings. On community we've started to put a few things down on paper and once we get out of blue sky mode I hope to be able to share some of the ideas and get your feedback through this weblog. I can't share everything though, if I did that then there wouldn't be the pleasant surprises :-)
The site visit was great. It is quite different walking through a venue as large as the LA Convention Center with no people around. We use the walk through to get an idea of how the space will be used. Often there are additional rooms available that may not have been open in previous years. That opens up options for using the space for breakouts or community activiities.
You also get a feel for the of scale of things. Many of the spaces like the Expo hall are drawn out on a CAD system for us to understand furniture placement. Even though I did a fair amount of drafting in college their is no substitute for comparing the drawing to the real thing.
So on last Thursday's trip we walked the convention center, met with the convention center staff, took a tonne of notes and took many pictures.
As we get closer to the event you'll hear more folks who are part of the "PDC all volunteer army" blogging as well.
We'll try and keep you in the loop on what goes on pulling an event like this.
Cheers!
P.S. I've posted this weblog entry under a category called "PDC". I've also posted the photos on this entry into Flickr.com with the a category of PDC as well. If I understand Technorati's new TAG functionality correctly, then this entry along with my photos from Flickr should all show up on the technorati TAG page for PDC which is located at PDC
