Meetings

Conference Circuit: Tractors Steeped in History

An association dedicated to preserving the history of antique tractors celebrates its main event's 40th anniversary. Also: Sociologists take over the Bay Area.

Love old tractors? This one’s for you.

The Mid-Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association (MMOGTA), a group for antique tractor enthusiasts, will be holding its 40th annual Mid-Michigan Old Gas Tractor Show this month. It’s an event that’s described as one of the largest of its kind in the Midwest.

The show takes place August 15th through 17th in the town of Oakley, Michigan (population 290) and brings in enthusiasts from across the country to see the tractors in action. A lot has changed in the years since the association first took shape. Back in the early years, according to the MMOGTA site (editor’s note: the link is not currently active), the group “could hold a membership meeting with about two picnic tables and still have room for the dog to rest his chin on the end of the bench.”

“That was 1974, and there were lots of peaks and valleys along the way, but, just as it has in the world around all of us, much has changed in our club as well,” the association’s website states. “We now typically have 100 members or more signed in at our monthly meetings, and the membership roster has grown to include more than 450 families.”

Each year, the association focuses on a different tractor manufacturer and brand. The 2014 spotlight will be on Huber Manufacturing, which produced roughly 14,000 tractors between 1898 and 1942 and but shifted gears during World War II to make road construction equipment, according to Farm Collector magazine. After the war, Huber never went back to making tractors.”

The Week Ahead

August 15-20: The American Correctional Association’s Congress of Correction has almost arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah. The event comes as an open call to members of academia, jail professionals, military and security personnel and other members of the field. For a full listing of events, click here [PDF].

August 16-19: The leaders of the sociology world will be gathering in San Francisco for the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. Jam-packed with nearly 600 sessions and over 4,600 presenters, six sessions of the conference will be broadcast live online, and through the archives, you can watch conference sessions stretching back to 2002. (By the way, we hear Facebook will be around.)

August 18-20: For an example in collaboration, examine how the Institute of Internal Auditors and Information Systems Audit and Control Association hold their joint Governance, Risk, and Control Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. If you think it’s hard enough organizing events within your own organization, imagine working hand-in-hand with another!

Down the Line

September 8-11: The very first official car-company-sponsored app development conference will be held by Association of Global Automakers in Las Vegas during Super Mobility Week. The Ford Developer Conference will be September 8.

That evening after the conference ends and into the following day, 50 teams of developers will be invited to compete in a 12-hour hackathon. Using data sets supplied by both Ford and the City of Los Angeles, they will aim to develop creative apps that can eventually be submitted to the Ford Connected Car-Connected City App Pursuit competition at the Los Angeles International Auto Show in November.

(photo by kc8kzn/Flickr)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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