• The APEC Organizations
• The Sponsor's Agreement
• The Paper Review Process
• Volunteering To Review Papers
• Choosing APEC Locations
• APEC MicroMouse Contest Rules

More About APEC:
Choosing APEC's Locations

The APEC Steering Committee is charged with finding locations for future APECs. Usually the Steering Committee enlists the assistance of the Conference Management firm. The Steering Committee first considers the general area of the country where the conference is to be held. Working with the Conference Management, they choose one or more cities on which to focus the search.

The Steering Committee also works up a conference specification. This specification describes the needs of the conference:

• The number of size of rooms for the seminars and technical sessions,
• The number of booths required in the Exposition,
• An estimate of the number of other meeting rooms that will be needed,
• The number of sleeping rooms needed, and
• The range of dates the Steering Committee is willing to consider.

Using the conference specification, the Conference Management identifies candidate hotels or convention facilities. The specification is sent to each of the candidate hotels with a request for a bid for the conference. The Conference Management handles the interface with the candidate hotels and convention facilities. When the quotations and proposals have been received by the Conference Management, they are forwarded to the chair of the Steering Committee.

The Steering Committee reviews the proposals. If there is a need for negotiation or clarification, the chair of the Steering Committee will work with the Conference Management to get answers or updated proposals. Once the Steering Committee has chosen a particular hotel or convention facility, the chair works with the Conference Management to develop a contract. The Steering Committee signs contracts on behalf of APEC.

CONSTRAINTS

In choosing a location for APEC, the Steering Committee must work with a number of constraints. The principal constraints are:

• The Sponsors have agreed that APEC will only be held in the United States.
• APEC must be held in February or March. This prevents conflict with PESC (June) or the IAS Annual Meeting (October) or Intelec (October)
• February or March means locations in the southern United States only. Holding the conference in a location like Chicago risks having the conference ruined by bad weather.
• The exhibits require shipping a large amount of bulky freight to and from the conference. It is not practical to ship this freight outside the continental United States. This rules out locations like San Juan, Puerto Rico or Hawaii.
• It is the explicit intent to rotate the location of the conference year by year from a location in the western United States (e.g. southern California) to a location in the central United States (e.g. Texas or New Orleans) to a location in the eastern Unites States (e.g. Florida or Atlanta and then back to the western United States
• The Steering Committee would like to keep APEC under one roof in a single hotel or conference center as long as possible. The alternative is to have conference in a convention center with participants staying in nearby, but physically separate hotels. The Steering Committee fears this would spoil the intimate family feel of the conference.
• APEC takes up an enormous amount of space per attendee because space is needed simultaneously for the presentations (seminars and technical sessions) and the exhibits. This keeps us out of many locations that could support the presentations or exhibits, but not both.
• APEC is an awkward size conference. With 2000 participants, 5-6 session rooms and 150+ booths, the conference is too large for most hotels and smaller convention facilities. However, it is too small to make effective use of most convention centers in the United States.

With all of these constraints, the job of finding good locations for APEC is not easy. The Steering Committee is constantly looking at the size and growth of the conference and trying hard to find locations that will offer a superior conference experience.