Your humble editor has attended about 20 IES annual conferences. I have often wondered what the conference would look like if strong content were combined with an excellent venue during a month appropriate for that particular venue. We may have found out this week at the IES Annual Conference in Hungtington Beach, CA. On the ocean in Southern California is a good thing. October instead of August is also good. And it appears the content is very strong.
Here are my unverified statistics:
- 400+ Attenddes
- 29 Illumination Award winners—with 26 actually attending to receive the award in person
- 30+ Emerging Professionals
- 20 Past Presidents
Hats off to Jennifer Jacques, of Lighting Application Sciences, who was the chair for this conference. She and her team have done an excellent job.
Commercialization. The IES has a policy that conference presentations should be non-commercial and the overwhelming majority of speakers follow this policy to the letter. The Street and Area Lighting Conference has a policy that presentations must be approved in advance. At the September SALC conference, one speaker had a few ‘minor’ changes so he spoke from slides on his thumbdrive, not the previously approved slides. Unfortunately the ‘minor’ changes made the presentation very commercial. At that time, EdisonReport decided that we will call out companies who break the IES policy on commercialization.
Today we reference the Annual Conference keynote talk, Tactical Social Media: Fail your Way to Amazing: Become a Social Business, presented by Ekaterina Walter. It was one of the best keynotes in recent memory and many attendees were raving about the talk. Most agreed that our industry is quite weak at the social media thing and several people told me of specific ideas they hope to implement, as a result of the speach. One company that is doing well at social media is OSRAM SYLVANIA. How do we know? Because Ms. Walter referenced several OSI examples, apparently unaware of IES’s policy to not promote specific lighting companies.
Other than that one issue, the 2013 IES Annual Conference is going quite well.