CHICAGO – My, how the face of meetings and events has changed in the last five years.
Last spring, the Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) set up a permanent council to review and periodically update the procedures and definitions that help our industry stay consistent, relevant, and professional. APEX is a project of the 34-member Convention Industry Council (CIC), and I promise that most of the acronyms and formalities in this post are now out of the way.
The nine APEX standards cover many of the fundamentals of a successful meeting, from event specifications to requests for proposals (RFPs), from housing and registration to meeting and site profiles. At this writing, APEX panels are working on new standards dealing with exhibits and, of particular interest to our firm, green meetings. On the Standards Review Council (SRC), I get to work with nine colleagues from many different corners of the industry…and our first, daunting challenge was to review the 3,800+ terms and definitions that make up the APEX glossary.
At the moment, we’re half-way through a two-day meeting to determine which of those definitions we will recommend for deletion. Somewhere along the way, we’ll likely come up with a new crop of emerging terms that should be added to the glossary. By the end of this marathon process, there should only be one mystery left unanswered: How could Rachel, Karen, and Adrian ever get the idea that I don’t believe in fun?
Actually—I kid you not—the glossary exercise has been a lot more stimulating and, often, more flat-out hilarious than it might sound. Like the shining moment when Glen Ramsborg, PCMA‘s encyclopedic senior director, education, argued that the new glossary should include the definition of ASCII, the once-ubiquitous American Standard Code for Information Interchange. After all, he said, ALT-0150 is still a great shortcut if you want to add an emdash to your text.
“You could do that but, I’m sorry—it’s called a keyboard,” replied Shawn O’Connell of PSAV Presentation Services. “That would be a no,” said Lisa Laubgross of Booz Allen Hamilton.
Most fascinating of all, the need to focus on about 4,000 glossary terms has given us a snapshot of a very rapid transition that gets evened out when you’re living it day by day.
The revolution in meetings technology is plainly obvious, in the language we’re removing and in the essential new terminology that may not have existed when the glossary was last reviewed five years ago. Gone are the references to VHS and betacam video formats, broadcast fax, opaque projectors, 2-by-2 slides produced from 35 mm. photographic film, and “Web” as a short form for that brilliant new business tool, the World Wide Web. Yet to be added are references to virtual meetings and Telepresence, social media and sustainable meetings, and all the other emerging trends that are transforming the way we work as meeting professionals.
“There’s a line drawn in time, and anything after that isn’t in the glossary,” commented Anne Roth of IHG, Intercontinental Hotels Group.
The revised lexicon will also reflect the broader perspective of an industry that is becoming truly, self-consciously global. A few dozen of the terms we reviewed Monday were flagged for their relevance and familiarity outside the U.S. and Canada. At one point in the afternoon, independent planner MaryAnne Bobrow was busily Googling the European and Asian equivalents for some of the North American language we’d decided to retain. (Hmm. Google. Industry term or general usage? Proper noun or verb? Permanent terminology or passing fad? Lots of decisions still ahead.)
Along the way, we’ve also seen the hazards of using phonetic interpretation to internationalize the language of meetings. We’re recommending a very long list of food and beverage terms for deletion, which means my Québécois ear will no longer be ringing with well-intended renditions like “ben kwee” for bien cuit, “co keel san jock” for Coquilles St. Jacques, “kwa sant” for croissant, “ee clare” for éclair, “flom bay” for flambé, “foo may” for fumé, “peek aunt” for piquant, or “paw tay de foy graw” for pâté de foie gras.
That overall shift—the decision that a qualified meeting professional needn’t know food terminology well enough to second-guess a hotel chef—heralds a streamlined APEX glossary that will pull the industry toward a posture that is just a bit more strategic. The change will necessarily be incremental: the fundamental purpose of the glossary is to support candidates for the Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) designation, and the brilliance of the CMP blueprint is, first and foremost, the sheer breadth of the tactical acumen it requires. But if an updated glossary helps meeting professionals prepare a bit better for the big-picture issues that are buffeting and reshaping our industry, we’ll all be better for it.
After this week’s meeting concludes, our work still won’t be done. We’ll leave Chicago with a fairly large number of glossary terms to review. Once tht process concludes, SRC Chair Doug McPhee will present the recommendations to CIC commissioners. Not long afterwards, the glossary will be online for the industry to use…and we’ll move on to a rolling review of the various APEX standards that will continue for the foreseeable future.

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