The Meetup
We would love to hear suggestions from you if you can offer a creative workaround. As this meeting has come to a close, we are already busy with the next. Arguably my favorite city, New Orleans will host our 2024 Interim Meeting in January. Registration is open and there you’ll find our reservation link for the Royal Sonesta New Orleans hotel, important dates to get the best deals, and exhibiting information. We will be in the heart of the French Quarter on Bourbon Street, just minutes away from Jackson Square, the French Market, and Algiers Point. Named for a royal family in France, not the alcohol, Bourbon Street is well known for the neon lights, open doors and windows, beads, and balconies. Bourbon Street extends 13 blocks from Canal Street to Esplanada Avenue before tapering off into the Marigny neighborhood. The street dates to 1718, when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded it and French engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the streets in 1721. The Royal Sonesta Hotel opened in 1969, but the site itself dates to when the city was founded and once contained stables, houses, and a brewery. The exterior of the hotel was designed to look like a typical 1830s row of houses and is an architectural style unique to New Orleans. Luckily for us, the interior has been renovated a time or two and will be a perfect spot for our meeting. Are you one who gets carried away in a book? Then I have quite the list for you. After realizing the missed opportunity in Savannah having not read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil prior to arriving, I took mental note to better prepare.. for all of us. Dan Baum’s Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death and Life in New Orleans, Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces should get you started. Please let me know how you like them and if you have more to add to this list. I purposefully left off books about the devastation caused from Hurricane Katrina, but there are many remarkable ones if you do a quick search. I am already looking forward to our “family reunion” on the eve of the Interim Meeting. Please make your travel plans to allow for an informal Saturday evening gathering where we can “laissez les bon temps rouler”! Register today and reserve your room- we will sell out of our block!
Elisa Stritt Director of Operations
Thank you for the wonderful turnout in Norfolk, Virginia for the 108th NCWM Annual Meeting! We had a productive week which included a few new events on the schedule. The Southern Weights and Measures’ Member Education and Mentorship held a New Attendee Orientation Training which benefitted new and established attendees alike. We at NCWM often hear questions from newer attendees such as, “When am I allowed to speak during Open Hearings and Committee Work Sessions? When and how can I participate? Which rules exist during voting?” and this was a fresh way to address some of those uncertainties in a new way. We know attendees are more likely to participate if there is a higher level of confidence and understanding in how the processes work; we know the more we participate, the more we feel a sense of belonging which is paramount in the eyes of the meeting planner. Please send ideas my way if you know of additional efforts we can make to make new attendees feel more at home. Another new meeting to the schedule was CALM which stands for Community for All Legal Metrologists and it drew in a few new faces to the week. We also offered a Tuesday afternoon panel discussion called Women in Weights and Measures. The feedback we have received, from both women and men, has been exciting and we’re planning to increase the momentum with a Tuesday afternoon breakout for WWM at the upcoming Interim Meeting. The breakout room will provide the women a more personal opportunity to network and discuss pressing issues. After each meeting we send attendees a survey asking for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Every attendee indicated they loved the host city of Norfolk, Virginia and I concur. The weather improved as attendees arrived, the historic downtown offered a variety of dining options within walking distance, and the city was clean and friendly. The only constructive criticism worth mentioning from the survey is that attendees want to be in two places at one time, particularly on Sunday and Tuesday afternoons. We are limited with our schedule and sometimes it results in popular meetings happening concurrently.
4 NCWM-News
2023 Issue 3
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