We are heading towards small mini rallies and one large national rally after the planned rallies for this year are complete.

I think as a new organization (a term used very loosely) we are still finding our way. As our membership grows (assuming it will) the national rallies have the potential to become large. By large I mean 100 or more coaches. For now let's assume our first national rally will be Oklahoma City in April of 2009. lets also assume we can get an attendance of at least 100 coaches.

That number of attendees brings with it some benefits and some drawbacks.

On the seminar side I see some problems with hands on seminars unless the groups are broken up into smaller sizes and we run several parallel sessions. JDUB talked about the possibility of having a coach or two up in the air and doing an undercoach seminar. That is possible if the group is about 10 or 15 people, but if we have more it will be impossible to give everybody an opportunity to get up close and personal with highly polished slack adjusters.

In Sevierville there was a traveling seminar by Rick May and Ben Cummins. We had about 40 people and undoubtedly some could not see in detail what was being shown so we know the numbers impact how the seminar can be presented. The seminar Hector and I did regarding the air suspension could have had a larger attendance with no loss of quality for attendees, and the seminars by Bill Jensen and Goodyear were also capable of having many more attendees.

So the size of the rally affects what the seminars can cover or how they are presented. We as a group need to do the planning and discussion now. This is not Jim Skiff's responsibility.

So far every rally has been great. So far the attendance has not been so large that we cannot personally interact with everybody in attendance. I do not know what the number of attendees has to be, but at some point we shift from becoming a single large group of friends to a mob of cliques or disassociated groups of friends.

When we attended early Prevost Proud rallies that had 30 to 50 coaches we felt we were a part of the group. When the Prevost Proud rallies were 200 coaches we never felt so alone. As a POG member I never want any other POG member to attend a rally and feel alone.

I see large attendance rallies to have a huge advantage apart from the problems I see on the social side. As a group we can get high quality seminars from Detroit, Allison, Lifeline, and Prevost. I can envision various converters providing on site tech support and maybe even conversion specific seminars.

But I also see a central national seminar as being a loser. If we have centrally located rallies conceptually it seems the way to go, but the reality is that everybody has a long and expensive drive and that may serve to reduce attendance. Before we cast anything in stone I think we should explore places, the issue of number of attendees, the topics and presenters, and a parallel program of high quality for our significant others who do not intend to learn how to polish slack adjusters.