...where a big number of the pots are placed on a larger board.

I would route the analog signals of corresponding pots (being used as simple voltage dividers of a reference voltage) to a simple analog multiplexer next to the micro and would use a scheme published in this link I mentioned earlier

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resou...OC0524.PDF

or would just use a micro already containing an ADC.

Filtering at the inputs of multiplexer is needed to prevent the digital noise of microcontroller section to spread out over the whole board, and, not least, to satisfy Mr. Shannon and Nyquist.

Kai