[Air-l] [AOIR 8.0] Vancouver Conference Update

[Richard Smith]

Dear fellow AIR members,

By now most of you will have received your acceptance (or not!) notices for
your paper/presentation at AIR8.0 in Vancouver. Mia Consalvo, the program
chair, and the many reviewers who worked with her deserve a huge round of
applause (digital, for now) for their heroic efforts in getting the reviews
done and back to you. I hope it worked out for the best for you.

With a review in hand, no doubt you are toiling night and day on your final
paper. While you are doing that, however, you might have some questions
about the conference itself. Where will I stay? What will I wear? Will there
be decent wireless available? Who are the keynote speakers? What else can I
do while I am in Vancouver? Those questions (and many more, I am sure), are
what I am here to answer for you.

My name is Richard Smith, and I am the Conference Chair, and your host for
the AoIR 8.0 "Let's Play!" conference to be held in Vancouver this October.
I will write to you from time to time, and maintain a set of wiki pages, to
keep you apprised of our plans, the arrangements, and anything else you want
to know. I look forward to meeting all of you, and hope this is the best
conference ever.

I won't clutter up your email box with too many of these newsletters, but
let me start with a few short bits of news:

Wireless

 * We will have a site-wide, industrial strength wireless network available
for all delegates with a laptop or other 802.11b compatible device. We also
have three areas for you to access a workstation, for those of you who don't
want to carry around a computer.

 * The hotels and cafe's in the vicinity of the conference offer wireless
internet and most of them have it for free.

Hotels

 * We are using a conference centre that is part of my
university<http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/mecs/index.htm>,
so we are not obliged to "encourage" you to stay in any particular hotel.
Feel free to use your favorite internet room booking site to get your
accommodation.

 * There is quite a nice hotel right across the street and many more in the
immediate neighbourhood, ranging in price from $75/night to ... well, the
sky is the limit when it comes to hotels, but you can find something nice
for $150. (All prices in Canadian dollars, currently trading for about .87
US.

 * I will post - once I have the wiki up and running - a more detailed list
of hotels in the immediate area, along with prices and recommendations.
Personally, if I have to stay downtown for the night I stay at the "Ramada
Limited" on Pender Street. See their site at http://www.ramadalimited.org/

Dress/Clothes/Weather

 * Vancouver is "west coast" and dress is pretty casual here. But we are
also in the Pacific Northwest and evenings will be cool, so bring a sweater
or light jacket. Although October isn't officially the rainy season, it
certainly *does* rain here, so bring some shoes that aren't going to leave
you with wet feet all day. Here are some stats on the weather here:
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/stats/pages/C02096.htm?CABC0308

Tourism/Activities

 * I know you will be spending all your time with your head down at the
conference and won't have time for any frivolities, but if you DO want to do
a little dancing (crazy AIR folk that you are), we can point you to some
clubs. Vancouver is one of those cities with a "downtown renaissance" driven
largely through a condo building boom over the last decade. As a result, the
downtown is full of people in the evenings, and there are LOTS of things to
do.

 * We also live right next to the ocean, the mountains, the wilderness... if
you want to know more about things like trips to Whistler (probably no
skiing in October, I'm afraid), wait for my wiki pages with travel ideas.

Keynote speakers

 * I am thrilled to tell you that both Henry
Jenkins<http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/>and Cory
Ondrejka <http://lindenlab.com/management#ondrejka> have accepted our
invitations to speak. In addition, I am just in the final negotiations with
a third, wonderful keynote speaker I am sure you will enjoy. This will be an
AIR to remember.

Pre-conference workshops

 * Several people have stepped forward to organize preconference workshops.
I won't steal their thunder here, but you can count on a doctoral workshop
as in years past and if you're a student you will be pleased to know that
the entire workshop is being sponsored by Microsoft
Research<http://research.microsoft.com/>(thanks Marc Smith! and thanks
to Nancy Baym who organized that
sponsorship!), meaning that you will not go hungry or suffer from a lack of
coffee during that event.

 * Other preconference workshops include one focused on internet history,
one focused on the use of second life in teaching and learning, and one on
the impact of the internet on organizations. Details on these, as well as
"fun" tours and such will come in future notes like this one.

I hope this whets your appetite for information about Vancouver. This being
the era of intelligent search engines, and wikipedia, I don't suppose I have
to do much more than invite you. You can do the rest. But if you run into
trouble, or you are debating between two hotels, or some other question that
isn't readily visible online (and we WILL get that wiki going soon), give me
a shout. Reply to this email: smith at sfu.ca (yes, I really did get the user
ID of "smith"), and I will try to help you.

Warmest regards,

...r
-- 
Richard Smith, Associate Professor School of Communication
Conference Chair, Association of Internet Researchers, AoIR 8.0: Vancouver
Simon Fraser University, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, CANADA V6B 5K3
Phone: 604 291 5116 Web: http://www.sfu.ca/~smith/
<http://www.sfu.ca/%7Esmith/>
New book!: http://arago.cprost.sfu.ca/smith/mawc