Catching up on your conferences

I’ve written previously about using Twitter to attend conferences. In the past week, there have been a couple of conferences of interest to the multifamily industry:

NAA Educational Conference (Twitter hashtag #naaeduconf)

Solutions for Working Families (hashtag #swf2009)

Association of College and University Housing Officers (hashtag #acuhoi).

If the Tweet streams provoke additional questions, a couple of folks have collected their thoughts (or Tweets) and posted them:

NAA Educational Conference

NAA-produced summaries, the ‘best of #NAAEduConf Tweets collected by Ellipse, a summation from Lisa Benson’s panel, Heather Blume’s Notes from NAA, a couple of dailies from The Apartment Finder Blog, and the poorly-lit but always informative Mark Juleen (video link).

Solutions for Working Families
The NHC’s Open House Blog provided most of the daily color, as well as a copy of Sec. Donovan’s remarks, plus a podcast from Nic Retsinas of Harvard’s Joint Housing Center.

ACUHOI

Adventures in Higher Ed summarizes three days of ACUHOI

Can’t Make It? Follow It

UPDATE Presentations from the 2009 Apartment Internet Marketing Conference are now posted.

The conference season is well underway and I, among many others, am not traveling frequently. Nevertheless, I am very interested in tracking the sessions at the ACI/American Comfort conference, the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference, and the American Planning Association’s National Conference.

Thanks to the hashtag (#) feature of Twitter, I can follow conversations, receive session highlights, and find blog posts that provide even greater detail. You don’t need a Twitter account, just visit search.twitter.com and type in the event name. A search will usually reveal the #hashtag being used for a particular event.

Once you know the #hashtag, you can type it in and pull up all posts (aka Tweets) related to that event. In this case, I’ve searched for #aci09, or the Affordable Comfort conference.

If you have a Twitter client for your desktop (such as Tweetie, Tweetdeck, or others) you can usually search from within the client for events like the Apartment Internet Marketing conference.

Perhaps the greatest benefit is that by identifying attendees at conferences of interest, you can then follow them in Twitter, email them for additional information, or just call them up.

EERE Webcast December 17th on State Green Incentives

The Department of Energy’s Technical Assistance Program will present “State Policies to Encourage Green Building Principles” via webinar on December 17th from 3-4.15pm EST.

Presenters for this series are:

Brian Lips, a policy analyst for the North Carolina Solar Center at N.C. State University and conductor of research related to the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE). He will give an overview of state green government policies nationwide.

Chuck Sathrum, program manager at the North Carolina State Energy Office will discuss the N.C. Utility Savings Initiative, a comprehensive program to reduce utility expenditures and resource use in public buildings.

Angie Fyfe: Fyfe, manager of the Greening Government Program at the Colorado Governor’s Energy Office, who will discuss how executive orders encourage state employees to reduce energy consumption.

Background material can be found in the Energy Office Project Briefs.

Past webinars covered energy efficiency in data centers, solar PV financing, energy efficiency in improving air quality, and several state-level initiatives.

Conference: NeighborWorks “Greening Affordable Housing”

NeighborWorks is sponsoring a Training Institute in DC. Scheduled to run from December 8-12, 2008, here is the full course list.

The one that looks most interesting to me is this two-day course on greening affordable housing

Other areas of focus include:

Affordable Housing

Asset Management

Community and Neighborhood Revitalization

Community Building and Organizing

Community Economic Development

Construction and Production Management

Homeownership and Community Lending

Management and Leadership

Native American Community Development

2008 Conferences

What we hope will be a regular feature, conferences of some interest to housing and/or sustainability.

Mostly commercial structures:
Cost Efficient Sustainable Buildings
14-15 April 2008 — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Agenda

Renewable Energy:
Financing Renewable Energy Conference, Sponsored by Novogradac
1-2 May 2008 — San Francisco, California
13-14 November 2008 — Washington, DC

Affordable Housing
ACI Home Performance Conference 2008, Sponsored by Enterprise Community Partners
7-11 April 2008 — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Agenda