Last Holiday

It is official: the At-Home Dad Convention as we know it is dead. Longtime patron Bob Frank has walked away, and Frank's employer and longtime host, Oakton Community College, has pulled the plug. This shouldn't be a huge surprise: as I mentioned in November, there were likely to be some shakeups. But I understood the loss of the space at Oakton to be pretty remote. Not so, apparently.

This raises some serious, serious questions about the prospect of a national at-home gathering going forward. If anything replaces the Oakton convention, it'll end up being different. It'll be in a new city, probably. The date will change, no doubt. And it will certainly be more expensive, unless we can find a generous supporter. The formal and informal infrastructure of the Chicago event, from the pre- and post-convention program put together by Bob Noonan to the van full of dads from Dayton, could very well be gone.

There is so much passion for the issue, and so many of you thought deeply about what the at-home dad convention should be and shared those thoughts on the Convention 2006 wiki that I hate to see this all go away. Like most of you, my time is limited, and can't carry the baton with regard to planning. But I'll commit the full weight of this site (modest though it is) to promotion and connecting groups.

And if we can't make a go of a national convention, it may be a fine opportunity to kick off Jeff's grand idea of a regional at-home dad group. I love the idea of set of regional conferences, all going off on the same day.

There will be more on this from me in the coming days. I'll be tweaking the convention wiki as soon as I have the chance (or one of you can -- it *is* a wiki, after all). With no central organizers, a wiki might be a good way to get everyone in one spot.

Update: rudimentary changes made to the wiki. Have at it.