Still Meeting After All These Years

February 5, 1840, was a significant day in meetings history. It was on that day in Boston that the second-oldest continuously operating association in the U.S., the American Statistical Association, held its very first annual meeting. About 10 people attended. The meeting would convene in Boston for the next 70 years or so until 1908 when the board — citing declining membership (the ranks had dropped from a peak of 550 to about 300) — voted to branch out. The strategies they employed to