Attending Conferences « Discussions

Sep 25, 2007

Attending Conferences

Guys,
I saw the information regarding the annual IDCA conference in Chicago.
And I was wondering, if there is scope for looking at different conferences to attend?
To put it selfishly, we have achieved majority of objectives from IDCA; viz. developing contacts with the organizers, introduced Sankalp at the forum; met many of the speakers; hopefully generated enough 'useful' contacts in India.

One important concern with IDCA seems to be absence of biggies like ASHA, AID etc. And some contacts in these organizations could be very useful to Sankalp (both in USA and India). Long time ago (July 2001), we attended `Manthan' a conference organized by ASHA in Madison, Wisconsin. Before that (in 2000, I think), Anil (Gannepalli, our past president) attended a conference organized by AID, Boston. And we have benefited fairly with our association with AID in particular (in terms of projects, guest speaker in Ames etc).

Unfortunately pan-NGO conferences like SIF2002 (Serve India Forum, 2002) don't happen anymore! But we can explore options other than IDCA.
This email is just to initiate a new discussion thread please.
Your thoughts?

- Rahul

Posted at 08:25 pm by sankalp-isu


	Atul Madhavan September 27, 2007 09:09 PM PDT I think another important factor to be considered is the distance. We cannot afford to go to Boston, it will be cheaper for us to drive somewhere nearby. Madison is probably a good alternative.


	Rahul September 26, 2007 12:04 AM PDT Thanks all, For putting the discussion on the right platform. I did not think about blog option when I wrote the email! I agree with Muthu's suggestion. I did not mean to say that we ditch the IDCA this year!


	Muthu September 25, 2007 09:29 PM PDT My suggestion is, as we have already started planning for the IDCA conference this year, and taking the risk of leaving it and waiting for different conference is not a good idea considering the fact that GSB is the one who is funding it, we should go ahead with IDCA this year. At the same time, as suggested by Rahul we can start exploring new conferences related to our goals with in US and have a discussion on it. Once we are finalized may be we can frame the next years budget according to the new place and conference.

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