On Wednesday morning, our crack team of interns finished their work on the ballot for CMEpalooza Spring and we pushed it out to the CME world for their input. Frankly, Derek and I never quite know what sort of uptake we’re going to get with these sorts of things – as the pessimist, Derek typically moans and groans about how “we’ll be lucky to get 5 people” while I offer what I feel is a more realistic view of “perhaps 300.”

Not surprisingly, the final numbers often fall somewhere in between our glass all empty/glass all full prognostications.

You can imagine our giddiness when the numbers began quickly adding up – 50 voters in the first 2 hours, 100 by the end of the first day, 135 by the end of day 2. We’re now up to 137 138 139 voters (I told you these things change fast!), with a week still left for the laggards to chime on in. Polls close next Friday, Feb. 17, at 5 p.m. ET.

While our staff can see the polling numbers add up in real time (thank you Mr. Google), we prefer to keep the results close to the vest so as not to discourage any last-minute voters from chiming in. That said, here is a broad snapshot of what we’re seeing:

Truth: No single session in any category is garnering more than 50% of the vote.

Conclusion: With the help of some of our friends in the CME community, we came up with lots of potentially attractive ideas. And every single vote counts and all.

Truth: Only 1 session is garnering less than 20% of the vote (admission: it’s one of my ideas).

Conclusion: I’m not as smart or creative as Derek thinks I am.

Truth: The one session I thought would be a clear winner in the voting is, uh, not winning.

Conclusion: Maybe not such a great idea to follow my lead in laying down $1,000 on the Phillies to win the 2017 World Series (but it’s 150-1 odds people!)

Truth: Session descriptions that rank less difficult on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease scale are doing better than those that rank more difficult

Conclusion: Fake truth. I totally made that up. But I’ll have our interns run an analysis just in case I am right.

The title says it all, so let’s get right to it.

Click here to vote for the CMEpalooza Spring agenda!

The process is pretty simple (Should you trust the process? Yes. Yes, you should.) You will see six different categories in the survey: Outcomes, Educational Design, Case-Based Approaches, Commercial Support, Accreditation, and CME Potpourri (a deceivingly hard word to spell correctly.)

Under each category are three possible sessions (thank you to our colleagues who helped develop some of these ideas). Pick your favorite session, and only that one session, for each category. Click the SUBMIT button. That’s it.

Click here to vote for the CMEpalooza Spring agenda!

Voting will stay open until Friday, February 17 and…wait a minute. Is next Tuesday Valentine’s Day?? Uh oh. How the h-…sorry, sorry…got distracted…

Voting will stay open until Friday, February 17, and we will close it up at the end of the day. Then we will tally up the votes and the session from each category with the highest total will go on the Spring agenda. At that point, Scott and I will begin the faculty selection process.

Is that a quick turnaround to find faculty for CMEpalooza Spring? Yes, it is.

Am I a little nervous about that? I might be.

Do I blame Scott because it was his idea? Definitely.

Are we up to the task? Of course!

Now go vote (remember to hit SUBMIT)!

Click here to vote for the CMEpalooza Spring agenda!

And we’re back from the annual Alliance meeting, where the majority of private conversations dealt with the recently-leaked love letter that Derek wrote to Family Ties co-star Tina Yothers when he turned 14. If you haven’t already read it, I warn you that it’s quite spicy. Something about how “I love you more than the ColecoVision I got for Christmas last year, more than Joanie loves Chachi, more than my dad loves butter pecan ice cream.” Hand it to the man – he knows how to woo the ladies.

Anyway, after folks got through besmirching Derek’s character (what’s left of it), they turned to the next hot CMEpalooza-related topic: “How do I submit an abstract for CMEpalooza Spring?”

While I went over this a few weeks ago when we first made our splashy announcements about this year’s Paloozas, I understand that some of you may either have forgotten or missed it. So here is the information once again:

For this spring, we have come up with 6 session categories — Accreditation, Industry, Off-the-Wall/Potpourri, Outcomes, Educational Design, and Case-Based Formats — and are in the process of working with some of our most loyal fans to come up with ideas for sessions in each of those categories.

Our hope is that on Monday, February 6, we’ll be able to present to you, our “adoring” public, a slate of options to vote on in each category. These will only be titles and descriptions of the focus of the sessions themselves – there will be no pre-determined faculty, so no one will waste time recruiting folks for sessions that may hit the scrap heap.

The voting process will work in a similar fashion to previous years, except that you will only be able to vote for 1 session in each category. The winning session in each category gets added to the agenda, and the process of recruiting faculty then begins (our interns will be busy).

This approach, we hope, will give us a more balanced agenda with a greater variety of topics. While there is nothing necessarily wrong about having, say, 4 sessions focused on Outcomes, we are going to be moving away from that possibility. We understand if you will shed some tears, but we promise that, in the end, we’ll have a better, brighter program for everyone.

Now let’s say you have been sitting on an idea for a CMEpalooza session for months, just waiting for your chance to unleash it on the world. Never fear — we won’t let your idea go to waste! Simply come up with a title and a brief yet pithy description of your proposed session, fire off an email with all that information to either myself or Derek, and we’ll include your idea in the voting process. We’ll even present it anonymously in case you are embarrassed of public ridicule.

Here is an example of what a session title and description can look like (this would be appropriate for the Outcomes category, which is sort of obvious):

Incorporating Cost-Effective Creativity into Outcomes Design
Sometimes, it may seem like designing innovative approaches to outcomes measurement is like squeezing an orange. You squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until you figure out how to extract every last piece of “juice” from your data. But what if all you need is a new juicer from that late-night infomercial instead of that team of expensive experts in juice (or data) extraction? This session will look at less expensive yet effective ways to approach outcomes measurement for your educational initiatives.

Nothing too fancy or elaborate – just an idea with some fundamental details.

The deadline for sending something to us is Friday, February 3, which is, uh, pretty soon. Rest assured that if your submission somehow loops in Tina Yothers, it will get a prime location on our ballot.