Have you noticed lately that time has speeded up? Just last November, during an interview with Ann Gordon, CEO of the then six-month-old eSociety.com, Gordon described the advent of business-to-business Web portals as occurring "back in the late 1990s," somehow making just two years ago seem as remote as the Paleolithic Era.

Thanks to the Internet revolution, not only has the pace of the business world increased, but the direction of change is now so rapid it's hard to get your bearings. As Christine Stadler, marketing director at PlanSoft, pointed out in our annual roundtable (published as long ago as our December issue): "If the '80s were about quality, and the '90s were about process re-engineering, the first part of the millennium is going to be about the velocity of change--which means speed and direction."

With that in mind, we dedicate this year to helping you cope with the velocity of change. We're going to bring you cogent, synthesized content that targets your information needs as meeting and trade show managers in not-for-profit organizations operating in a world of Internet revolution. For starters, our first issue of 2000 brings you a trio of trend pieces, kicking off with an interview with William Taylor, founding editor of the wildly successful Fast Company magazine.

As Taylor points out in our interview, the nature of work itself and the expectations that people bring to it are changing faster than the environments they work in. People give more to their jobs, and they want more satisfaction and freedom in return. Yet, the work structures that most of us operate in are "artifacts from the industrial era," Taylor observes. How are meetings and associations changing as a result of this corporate trend? See page 34.

"Portal" is a mighty big buzz word these days, but what exactly does it mean for association meeting and trade show organizers? Turn to page 37 to find out why you should care. What are the 21 top legal trends affecting association meetings in the 21st century? On page 43, read all about insights gained from our interviews with three of the industry's top lawyers. In this issue, we are also introducing a new regular feature: a short case study focusing on an association in the vanguard of change. This month read about the radical housing policy that one association has instituted to help eliminate attrition (page 95).

Helping you cope with the velocity of change. That's our goal for the year ahead. Let us know how we're doing.