By Robert Pittman
The Porch is a busy place these days as we prepare for our sixth annual Janus Forum at Rabun to be held June 8-11 at our “home base” of Rabun County in the beautiful Northeast Georgia mountain and lake region. This year, we moved the Rabun Forum date up from early August to early June to coordinate better with the Forums at new venues that we are launching with Conway Data.
In my opinion, spring and early summer is when the Appalachian Mountains really show off their beauty. Creeks and waterfalls are full and blooming mountain laurel carpets the forest floor – a perfect setting for the Janus Forum. We will continue our tradition of letting the attendees decide the economic development topics and trends they would most like to discuss, We will also continue to invite a limited number of site consultants and corporate real estate executives to provide the “customer” perspective, and to learn from each other. For the first time, we have invited a limited number of state economic development commissioners. They will have their own Forum Sunday Morning to share best practices and learn new trends from each other.
If the attendees desire, we can also continue to revisit some topics from previous Forums. The two topics from our recent Forum at Watercolor in Florida – economic development “under attack” and establishing and operating public-private organizations for economic development. The summary of these topics is captured in the latest Janus Journalpublication.
There is a wealth of information in the Journal on the two topics assessed at the Watercolor Forum. Rabun Forum 2014 attendees may well want to take up where the last Forum left off or select new topics for assessment. Either way, the Janus Journal will keep a record of all relevant findings and ideas from the Janus Forum on this topic.
Where does the Forum go from here? Well, there are lots of topics to discuss and assess, be they existing topics or new ones. One of our long-range objectives for the Forum is to continue to promote a better level of understanding of community and economic development (which we think will help address the economic development “under attack” topic listed above) and to break down some of the walls between key economic development stakeholders.
By the way, there are a few seats left for the Rabun Forum coming up in just a few days in Rabun County March 2014. Attendance is by invitation, but if you are interested, please call Amanda Lilla (insert contact info) or me (404-431-1255) rpittman@janusinstitute.org) and join the discussions.
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