COST‐EFFECTIVENESS

Abstract

This conference is an information system—you are the users and I am one of the documents that has been retrieved by the system operators. Each of you will ‘read’ up to six documents and will, I hope, discuss them with each other. The cost to each one of you is the £14 conference fee plus incidentals. Few of you will have met this cost yourselves, having persuaded your employers to foot the bill as well as giving you a day off to attend the conference, making a total cost of the order of £25 per organization. The conference organizers have controlled the finances and, like you, have chosen to expend energy on this exercise rather than some other activity. Three groups of people, the conference organizers, your organizations and yourselves, all have individual expectations and when the conference is over will assess to what extent these expectations have been met. The conference organizers will heave a sigh of relief before becoming involved in planning next year's conference, when they will take into account those of your views of this year's conference that they come to hear about. Your views, I suggest, will depend to a considerable extent on chance: the conversation you happened to have with the person sitting next to you at dinner; a train of thought stimulated by a discussion of one of the papers and, in the even longer term, the unforeseen connection between something a speaker said and a problem encountered a month later. As for the people who actually paid the money—some organizations require delegates to present formal reports when they return to work, and must rely on this method of assessing whether their money was well spent. As conferences continue to be organized for the exchange of information we must assume that they are worth-while. I personally think they are, and though I hate to say so at this particular moment, there is clearly a lot of truth in the often heard general assessment: ‘It's not the papers you listen to, it's the people you meet.’ Incidentally, if this assessment is accurate, it is worth considering to what extent conferences are organized to meet this primary objective.