Bishop Conference Follow Up (draft)

Well, it was an outstanding conference as usual. I have received many congratulatory notes from attendees complimenting the conference organizers for their efforts and students for their outstanding research presentations. I would like to extend a thank you to everyone who came and made the whole weekend a pleasure to be around so many fun-loving friends.

There were 302 officially registered attendees at the conference; 230 of whom became members or renewed their membership with the C.G.S. These figures are in line with recent past conferences. We did not benefit from a large influx of "at the door" registrations that annually boosts our attendance and strain our ability to manage last-second requests for meals and field trips.

Here are some announcements:

1) There are some nice photos of the conference circulating out there. Please either send me the photos, so I may post them on the GGS's Google-based (Picasa) photo sharing site (https://picasaweb.google.com/CaliforniaGeographicalSociety). Some may already be on the CGS's Facebook site, so if you use Facebook, you might look us up there.

2) Cal State Northridge's Gene Turner and Jim Allen had a set of slides from their presentation that many, many requested access to for their courses and/or general interest. They've given me a link to share with you:

http://www.csun.edu/%7Ehfgeg005/eturner/gallery/CAethnicchange.html

3) We have a new phone number via Google Voice (805) CAL-G-SOC Cool huh? It forwards to my office phone; but it should prove very useful for conferences when we need a phone number that can be forwarded to one or many cell phones.

4) Keep an eye out for an email from our student board representative Zia Salim.

5) Because of an unexpected turn of events in the elections, we declined to announce the results at the banquet until we could properly count the numerous write-in and paper ballots. The results are as follows: Dan Walsh will remain as CGS Treasurer, continuing his term. The new and re-elected board members are: Kathryn Davis - San Jose State University, Jason Pittman - Folsom Lake Community College, Maureen K. Smith - Saddleback College , Benjamin Timms - Cal Poly SLO, Peggy Hauselt - California State University, Stanislaus.

I am especially pleased to welcome Ben Timms and Kathryn Davis to our board because they are not only great people to have on board, they also represent an expansion of our presence at San Jose State and Cal Poly SLO.