HHC 202x - thoughts?

[Eric Rechlin]

Glad to hear of your interest in future HHCs! I'll try to address each of your points:

1. The HHC conferences are an American thing and organized by Americans. There have been European conferences, too, but they have largely died out -- the London group (HPCC) tries to do a conference every 5 years, on the "2s" and "7", and there is a Swiss group that does the Allschwil conference every other year. But the American user community is the only one still big enough to have conferences every year.
   
   The exact location is really determined by who can volunteer to organize, usually picking some place local to them, meaning the locations are heavily dependent on where there is someone with the time and motivation to organize a conference.
   
   That said, many of the conference have been at or near major scenic locations. This year's conference was in Reno, which is right near Lake Tahoe and not far from Yosemite National Park, which are huge tourist destinations. A common place to travel through to get there was Las Vegas, whose fame goes without saying. Last year's conference was in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, which not only has a huge of amount of interest to tech enthusiasts (like the Computer History Museum), but is also right near San Francisco, a huge tourist attraction with so much to draw people in, and is also near some beautiful scenery like Muir Woods. Other conferences in recent years have been in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is the craft beer capital of the western hemisphere, and is in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, with easy access to Rocky Mountain National Park, and isn't far from Denver, Pikes Peak, and other interesting places.
   
   HHC 2020 is likely to be in Nashville, which isn't as famous of a tourist location as some other places, but it's still a very interesting part of the country. You don't have to drive far to get to the Smoky Mountains National Park, which has many scenic roads and some of the most fun driving in America. Nashville itself is very important to the history of country music, and it's not far from the home of bourbon, just north in Kentucky. Memphis, also famous for music (very important to the history of blues), is also not far away.
   
   Foreign attendees in the past have often made HHC into part of an American vacation. And just because the conference is in one city doesn't mean you can't go somewhere else to finish your trip -- flying isn't that bad, and renting a car is easy. The US is a big country, but you are rarely too far from top places to visit. Admittedly, we haven't had a conference on the east coast in decades, which would clearly be more convenient for Europeans and has some of our country's oldest history.
2. There is still plenty of time for socializing. Many people arrive a day or two early and stay a day late to do activities with others. The conference schedule typically only has around 10 hours of talks. That means the whole rest of your weekend is free for socializing.
3. It's an interesting idea to suggest multiple places where virtual attendees can get in a group to join, but I highly doubt there will be enough interest to justify the overhead involved in getting it to work. I was hoping to live-stream the conference this year but was unable to make it work; maybe next year I will have something.
4. I'm in your camp here and think door prizes are largely a waste of time, but there are others who vehemently disagrees, even going as far as buying two conference registrations to get an extra chance at winning things. Still, it's only maybe 45 minutes of the conference. And once Richard runs out of junk to put on the table, it will take even less time!