Out of the success from the shortly planned WC2004 meeting, we knew EC2005 must happen. Many people have already shown great enthusiasm in participating in this meeting, including Jazzers all over the US and Canada, as well as maybe one or two from Europe. What we need to start doing now is to form a general idea of how we can pull this together. The purpose of this thread is to poll those of you who are thinking of joining so we can get some statistics to further work from.


Location
For the location, lets first start by tallying which states people could possibly make it to. Here's a general list of the NE US states around which we're considering: NH, VT, MA, NY, RI, CT, NJ, PA, DE, MD, DC, OH, MI, MN, IL, IN, plus ON and QC in Canada. If you can't make it to any of these, then it's probably not worth replying. And if you want, you can separate your list into 'likely' and 'less likely' categories for a little bit of detail.

Month
Next, this will be sometime during the summer, so when about in the summer might you be available? You can give this in general terms such as Early/Mid/Late June/July/August.

Days
Also, which days of the week would you prefer? If only the weekends would work for you, then you can say Sat-Sun. If only the first half of the week works for you, then you can say Sun-Wed. You can give the range of days you'd be available, and you can also give the number of days you'd like to stay around.

Activities
Now, what are we going to do? This is greatly open to suggestions. This could also depend on where the meeting ends up being, but for now try to give general ideas. Some possible ideas could be going to a theme park, wandering around some mall, going to tourist attractions or going sight-seeing, going to see a movie, going camping (like those crazy Europeans), having a picnic somewhere, having a LAN party, going bowling, or just hanging out somewhere where we can chat and goof off or whatever.

Funds
What we decide to do depends somewhat on if you're able to pay for it. So just in general terms, how much do you think you could afford beyond your own traveling and lodging costs that would allow you to participate in whatever activities that could cost money. Could you pay to see a movie? Go to a theme park? Help put together a LAN party?


So, if you could just answer those questions if you're thinking of joining, that should help us plan further. Also if you have any other suggestions as to what we should be polling, bring them up now.