With little more than 100 days to go, we need to work hard now to make sure that our conference is a success.

At the moment, I’m most concerned about turnout. As of this morning, we had 69 people registered – of these 7 were from Turkey and 62 from abroad.

Our target for the conference is 200 – 150 from Turkey and 50 from abroad.

And that’s not all the bad news — only 20 of those who have registered say they can pay their own way.

Obviously, we’ll have many more people attending than that. We have a commitment to bring in about 10 from the Middle East and North Africa region. Even members of our Turkish steering committee have not registered to attend yet. So realistically, we have closer to 40-50 who will certainly attend. The biggest problem is going to be mobilizing a large turnout from Turkey.

Every day for the next two weeks I will doing what I can to build attendance. Here are some of the things I did today:

• Wrote again to every national trade union center in the region, and to key partner NGOs we have worked with, re-inviting them and pointing out that they can now register online.
• Wrote to the Turkish steering committee about these problems.
• Wrote to LabourStart senior correspondents focussing on their regions, asking what we can do to build interest.
• Make a list of another half-dozen ideas, including specific unions/countries/individuals to target.
• Posted a reminder to Facebook event, which 286 people have said they will attend or might attend.  I will be following up with another mailing via Facebook to all of them, as well as regular updates to the event page.

I’ll keep you informed.  But for the moment, the number to watch is this one:

69