MicrostockGroup

Sounds great. Like a gotomeeting type of webinar.

I am all for it, but I seriously doubt that it would happen. In the case of some companies who shall remain nameless, upper management won't want to take suggestions from us, and they won't want to share any of their "secrets" for profiting i.e. future plans. To my jaded view of companies nowadays, the more smoke and mirrors they can generate, the better for them. That way they don't have to be accountable.

But if it can happen, count me in to participate...if only for the entertainment value.

It would be great fun to hear "The Chad" from Fotolia attempting to answer a simple question about the value of a credit.

iStock hosts "iStockalypses" usually at least twice a year. While those events are mainly multi-day group shoots during daytime, there is always a lot of creative discussion going on and there are always sessions like "meeting the inspectors" or speaches about iStock´s plans and future.

As far as I know, every contributor is welcome to those sessions, though the number of tickets for the shoots are very limited. You can always meet inspectors and some of the content leads at those events and discuss acceptance standards or business perspectives if you like.

At the last iStockalypse, we had about 60 contributors for the shoots, another 20-30 just visiting and about 100 admins, inspectors, HQ stuff around as it happened in Calgary. The next one isn´t announced yet but if you are interested keep your eyes open. The event is travelling around the globe (e.g. there were ones in Berlin and Buenos Aires in recent years)

Yes, the last one had a very good 1-2 hour session with 5 of the department heads, taking questions.  I hope in some sense that I had a hand in that because I asked incessantly for something similar at the previous meet-up and it didn't happen.  Of course, the comments at the meeting were held pretty much to those in the session.

And I'm not saying that something good doesn't come from these events...but typically the true decision-makers from the companies are not present. Department heads could certainly pass along ideas, comments, suggestions, etc. so I guess that would be better than nothing.

And as mentioned by the last poster, these are now limited to exclusives (at IS). As if independents couldn't possibly have any relevant input, or don't contribute to the site's overall success and profit.