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2 more weeks to NoLAR 2
2008-Aug-13, Wednesday 08:59 amI'm starting to get excited about the second (annual, yay!) Northern Lights Autism Retreat. It's the best name that I could come up with alone last year when interest was still tepid. This year, a few other people volunteered to help organize the event, and it's moving along nicely. I'm pleased that it won't end up being just "Terry's event", as some people were referring to it last year.
I confirmed with my boss that I'll have Friday off from work (so I can ride the bus transport and do 'roll call' there) and the weekend free from pager support (so I can focus on the event itself). Yay for bosses who can take over sole support for their areas. She'll be the only one of us in our department at work that day, so she's going to handle it all for Friday through Sunday. This is very different from the tech support boss that I had 2 jobs ago. I like this one much better.
Because this conference focuses on being just a local event, I'm hoping that it can avoid the tendency that other events have to fall into high-priced edutainment with celebrity presentations. I hope that at some point I can instill in other attendees the vision that it remains a community-based event with no fees paid to presenters and minimal fees charged to attendees. I like the idea that since all of us are locals, we can take ideas uncovered during the event and continue to pursue them together after the event also. I'd like NoLAR to become a kind of "brain charge" that sparks other useful projects during the rest of the year.
One can hope.
I confirmed with my boss that I'll have Friday off from work (so I can ride the bus transport and do 'roll call' there) and the weekend free from pager support (so I can focus on the event itself). Yay for bosses who can take over sole support for their areas. She'll be the only one of us in our department at work that day, so she's going to handle it all for Friday through Sunday. This is very different from the tech support boss that I had 2 jobs ago. I like this one much better.
Because this conference focuses on being just a local event, I'm hoping that it can avoid the tendency that other events have to fall into high-priced edutainment with celebrity presentations. I hope that at some point I can instill in other attendees the vision that it remains a community-based event with no fees paid to presenters and minimal fees charged to attendees. I like the idea that since all of us are locals, we can take ideas uncovered during the event and continue to pursue them together after the event also. I'd like NoLAR to become a kind of "brain charge" that sparks other useful projects during the rest of the year.
One can hope.