Steven,
There could be some advantages to clashing with the main confeerence, One I see immediately is allowing the main conference to go for longer (5 days, 3 streams), if there are two mini confs on at the same time at the conference all week it is like having 5 streams but with two of them being miniconfs.
I guess this begs the question:
* Was there a reason for the conference to go for 3 1/2 days?
* If one extends the conference to a whole week, how would that:
- affect pricing
- affect scheduling
- affect staffing requirements (where staff may be volunteers but you
know what I mean)
* Is a main conference of 5 days and coordination of, say, 8
mini-confs, a bit much to ask a volunteer organisation to run?When does the conference become "so large" that it stops being "grassroots"?
DSL