First Annual Sponsor conference in Venice?

Today, I had lunch with Bryan Glascock, director of the Boston Environment Department and with Nigel Jacobs, special assistant to Mayor Menino on technology issues. Over the years, I have tried to get our sponsors from disparate project centers to know each other in a variety of ways. For example, I arranged a lunch with Bryan and Adrian Hewitt from the environment department of the London borough of Merton, when Adrian was in the US recently. I'd like to do much more of that and Bryan came up with a great concept: have an annual Sponsors' Conference at one of our centers around a specific theme, inviting sponsors from around the world who worked on that theme with our students. We should have the first one in Venice next year (early June?) in connection to our anniversary. We'll have to decide a theme and figure out the logistics and financing... small details. Ideally, we should pay the way for at least ONE sponsor from each center. It a win-win-win-win all the way around for WPI as a whole, for our centers, our Sponsors and our host cities. There are so many benefits to this idea that I really think we should follow up on it.