if you remember last year TRB pulled some theme areas off their critical issues list (congestion was one) and any sessions that addressed them were highlighted in the program. i think we had about 5 "gray box" sessions given our congestion focus. below is a note from tom p pointing out this year's spotlight areas. on a slightly related note i am talking up the concept of a presentation session with several other committee chairs dealing with the question "Where are we with Metadata". i wanted to mention this before Marcus Wigan reminded everyone for me that i agreed to take this on. next week several of us involved in census data activities will be at the planning applications conference in baton rouge. i suspect that we will, among other things be talking about getting another poster call off the ground. last year's session was very well received and this year there will be even more data available for "doing cool stuff with". this July will be our midyear meeting--too late to talk about annual meeting sessions. we should really be getting our ideas into the hopper sometime around june. if anyone has any ideas to toss on the table lets get them out now. if you want to bring something up by responding to everyone this email went to just do a "reply all". -------- Original Message -------- Subject: 2004 Annual Meeting "Spotlight Themes" Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 19:09:18 -0500 From: "Tom Palmerlee" <tpalmerlee(a)nas.edu> While the Council realized that selection of conference themes in April is a little behind the session development process for many committees, they thought it useful to select themes. The themes will be: -Security -Infrastructure renewal -Funding (including reauthorization). All these will be multi-modal. · Security · Infrastructure renewal · Funding (including reauthorization). All these will be multi-modal.