Design for Service

I noticed the other day that I hadn’t received a postcard for Emergence 2008. I didn’t read too much into it, but today I see that they’ve canceled the conference this year.

It’s too bad; they had two solid conferences under their belt and an opportunity to build on that success. A one year break doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that this is a student-run conference and students are only at CMU for two years, a break like this causes a gap in institutional memory. By 2009, the students who helped with Emergence 2007 will be gone and the new students will have to start from scratch.