Mentor

The Newsletter of Arisia, Incorporated — Number 147, May 2006

Notices

Quorum for the May meeting is 11, based on 51% of the average attendance of the last three meetings.

The following people have declared their candidacy for con chair: Tom Murphy, Carsten Turner, September Isdell. If you are interested in running for con chair for 2008, send mail to the eboard by the June meeting.

Minutes of the April Meeting

• Date, Time, and Place

Meeting called to order April 25, 7:37 pm at Kovalcik-Mozzicato residence

Lisa Adler-Golden, Donald Eastlake III, Jill Eastlake, Joel Herda, Lisa Hertel, Lisa Holsberg, September Isdell, Walter Kahn, Rick Kovalcik, Ben Levy, Michael Leuchtenburg, Skip Morris (arrived during new business), Susan Mozzicato, Tom Murphy, Rickland Powell, Karen Purcell, Noel Rosenberg, Jonah Safar, Nicholas Shectman, Mike Sprague, Janet Stickle

• Proxies

Jeanne Kahn to Walter Kahn, Bridget Boyle to Ben Levy, Alex Latzko to Joel Herda

• Corrections to the Minutes

None

• President’s Report

 If you're interested in running for con chair for 2008, please send email to the eboard by the June meeting.

Arisia has a book of 20 Boston Common parking garage tickets left over.  If you know anyone who's interested, it's $100 for the book; we'd like to unload them before they expire next January.

• VP – no report

• Treasurer

We have money.  Charge card merchant processing has all been transferred to the new account; this required waiting for the end of a month for the fees to come through.  Wainwright accounts will be closed soon.  Paypal is still broken; we need to make it be in our name instead of Skip's name.

• Clerk – not present

• Eboard

Approved the contract with the Hyatt and Rick signed it.  Ben will be putting a copy up on the Web.

• A06:  No report.

• A06 Treasurer: 

Not present.  Apparently we're quite close to closing the books.

• A07: 

Now that we have a signed contract, we can move forward with things like GoHs.  We will be having a div head walkthrough at the hotel as soon as we get a slot there.  I hope to have a budget for the June meeting.  Next concom meeting will be in June in the hotel, after some of the space issues have been settled.  Jim Stevenson will be Fixed Functions division head.  (This is a summary of the report sent to the clerk.)

• Corporate Inventory Control

Stuff went to Lunacon, and all came back.  Readercon wants to borrow two of the wireless swipe boxes.  Eboard will handle approval offline when we hear a formal request.

• Timeline

We have a coherent timeline.

• Hotel

The hotel search committee gleefully took the direction of the last business meeting and went to visit the three top choice sites.

Our full report can be found online via the Arisia Staff pages of the website.  This is a short report of the highlights as I see them.

Hyatt - Jill, Janet, Skip, and later Joel visited the Hyatt Regency Cambridge first. The hotel was enormously accommodating, putting a welcome sign with our badge on the welcome screen just inside the lobby, free parking, and goodies to eat at the (one) restaurant.  We met with our sales person, the banquet sales person, and briefly with the head of sales, all of whom were ready to help us in any way they could.

A tour of the hotel showed a nice facility, with the major parts of their function space on the lobby level, some on higher floors, and a huge space at the top which will be renovated (was a rotating restaurant) by the time we are there in January.  There will need to be 1. Some shoe-horning of ourfunctions to fit the space, and 2. An overflow hotel, most likely the Radisson down Memorial Drive, and 3. Shuttles between both hotels and the T.

This site was available on MLK weekend and tremendously agreeable to anything in the contract that is both legal and more than reasonable from our point of view.

Providence - On our way to Lunacon, Janet, Skip, Jill, and Joel went to Providence to see the Westin, the Providence Civic Center, and the Biltmore.  We were there about five hours.  Because we gave them little notice and were there on St. Patrick's Day, our own sales people were not available, so we saw back ups.

We saw the Westin first.  They have a large ballroom on the lobby level suitable for the masquerade, with doors leading to the street and parking garage, most of their function space is on the second and third floors. They had lots of smallish meeting rooms.  Their suites were few, all on the top two floors of the hotel, and could make a good focal point for the staff sleeping rooms.  They are directly connected, on the second floor, to the Providence Place Mall (with 22 eating establishments) and the PCC, with $8 per day parking.

We then visited the PCC.  We were shown their largest ballroom, two sections of which were in use by a teachers' convention, a few of their medium sized ballrooms, and their round ballroom.  The daily charges for these rooms, inmy opinion, rendered them too expensive for my taste.

We finished in the Biltmore.  The hotel is the same vintage as the BPP and has not been fully renovated.  There were some nice function rooms on various floors, some of which were gorgeous but hard to get to.  Their higher floor function space would make a nice gaming area with program. They have a floor of bedrooms suitable for dealers' row.  Night functions could happen here, with most of the parties in this hotel. We had a late lunch at McCormick & Schmidt's.

Both hotels were ready to sign us for decent rates but only for the first weekend in January or Easter weekend in April.  There were some minor conflicts with MLK weekend.

Hilton - Janet and I went to the Logan Airport Hilton.  Joel visited later. The Hilton is the first hotel on Hotel Avenue just out of the Ted Williams tunnel.  It is new, clean, modern.  All of the function space is on the second floor.  There are a few large function rooms and many small ones. They would impose a head count limit on our attendance, guessed to be 1750. They had few suites.  Their pricing was ok, but we were uninspired.  An overflow hotel would be required.

General - I asked Cris to lead the negotiations with the Hyatt.  Skip retained his contacts with Providence. Because of the proximity of the Hyatt many members of the e-Board found ways to visit the hotel and look around.  A few visited Providence and also looked around there.

The e-Board subsequently chose to sign with the Hyatt because of their proximity to downtown Boston, the availability of MLK weekend, and their bend-over-backwards attitude toward winning our business. Rick signed with them a few days ago with a provision in the contract for negotiation for 2008.

Future - The committee seeks the advice of the corporation in researching the big Boston hotels for 2008.  All of them will be larger than the Hyatt, and so more likely to hold a huge Arisia.  All of them will be more expensive both for the corporation and for members of the convention staying at the hotels

and/or parking at them.

Rick asked the hotel committee to work in parallel on research for '08 and overflow hotels for '07.  Janet believes we can meet the $115/night constraint at either the Marriott or the Radisson, but Marriott will not give us as many other bennies such as cheap parking.  We will aim to have information on the big 5 for the next corporate meeting.  Thanks again to the hotel committee.

• Other committees – no report

• Old business - none

• Announcements, new meetings and discussion

Question from Lisa A-G:  How should we deal with not really enough staff?  People don't want to volunteer because the jobs are too big. Anime Boston doesn't have enough staff either.  We could do a staff swap/training program, go help out with their convention and snag some of their folks to help on Arisia.  Joel will talk to them.

Question from Rickland:  At what point do marketing arrangements such as sponsorship enter the domain of the corporation?

Question from Rick:  What would be a reasonable attendance cap?  Joel will get back to corp on this.

MSP to set the time and place of the July meeting to Sunday August 6 at 2pm at Janet Stickle's house. [note, since the meeting it has been announced that the place will change. We have other volunteers for the same date.

MSP to cancel the meeting that would ordinarily occur on the third Sunday of August. Note that this takes us through September as the annual meeting will occur as scheduled.

Announcements:  Jill is recruiting for the Chicago in '08 bid committee.  Skip is moving back to New England full time. Merv is moving too, but within Somerville. Tom Murphy would like to run for con chair in ’08.

Ben and Phi are looking for help to run a party at the Worldcon in LA, probably on Friday but not set in stone.  We do not have a suite yet.

Joel is looking for someone to run a party at Balticon, possible Sunday night.  AnimeBoston would love it if we ran a party there as well.

Meeting adjourned at 8:27 PM.

Mentor Subscription Information

Subscription to Mentor of Arisia is included with Corporate Membership to Arisia, Incorporated. Membership runs from September 1st to August 31st and costs $24. Dues are pro-rated on a monthly basis for members joining during the year.

Membership Roster

Executive Board

Committee Members & Corporate Appointed Officers

ARISIA, Incorporated

Building 600, PMB 322

1 Kendall Square

Cambridge, MA 02139