I will surely prove you wrong about making an impact! Just wait and see
I'm absolutely sure that this is true, and I apologise for giving you a very hard time over this when you were just being nice to me. It was your misfortune to step to the plate just when I asked who would be attending.
Still and all, I find it very frustrating if the ancient coin collecting community, which Forum's
Discussion Board represents more than any other website in the world, is entirely absent from the premier once-in-a-decade worldwide event devoted to
ancient coins. It's difficult to value our numismatic insights shared so freely on
Forum, if they are uninformed by the direction of current research as represented by the International Numismatic Congress. It also weakens the voice of collectors on matters such as
cultural property and restrictions on trade and collecting, if collectors stay away en-masse from the conference where such ideas are formed among numismatic archaeologists, curators, and university experts. This is the only conference where all of ancient
numismatics comes together, and decisions are made by those who turn up. I would have at least expected half or so of the
Procurator Monetae and a similar number of other collectors to be there - meaning that it's reasonable that 20 to 40
members of our
discussion board would attend. That would
still leaves 95% of the projected 800 attendees as non-collectors, but it would at least mean that there's a
fair chance that an
average attendee would meet and talk to at least one collector in the course of a week's worth of coffee breaks, after-talk-questions and dinners. Talking to each other here on
Forum is nice, but it neither draws on what the mass of non-collecting archaeologists, curators and professors are currently working on,
nor does it influence policy. We have to go into the world outside our cocoon to do that and the International Numismatic Congress is a perfect venue to do so.