After the IQPC ELN conference, I’ve seen quite a number of discussions regarding it popping-up in a variety of other tools. I see comments here in TheIntegratedLab from John, just as one example. I did not attend that conference but I get the impression that people came out excited from it and that they learned something.
The sad reality is that they seem to be talking about the same things we talk about coming out of each conference: the future of the various laboratory informatics tools, how to integrate these tools, how mature these tools are, and similar topics. These are the same topics that come out of each conference, year-after-year-after-year. Last week, speaking with some other consultants in the industry, we were noting that a good number of the presentations at conferences are just the same old talks we’ve seen for years, merely given by a different person. Each person thinks they’ve discovered something new, gives their presentation, we all sit and watch, and nothing happens to change the industry.
In fact, the only reason I find this conference notable isn’t the topics, of course – it’s the level of excitement and interest coming out of it. If people stay interested and discuss these issues throughout the year, there’s a potential for change. I think the key is that there was some combination of people, or possibly the way the conference was run, but some other key factor that got people talking about the topics and excited-enough to carry that out of the conference.
So, although the conference topics are important, especially to those people so new they’ve not seen them, before, I would say that all conferences are not equal. For example, every conference has presentations on how to have a successful project implementation, but we continue to have a high rate of project failures. A handful of people going to a conference don’t solve that problem. But if those people share their excitement and certainty about how projects must be run, they influence the others that can’t afford to attend or might not have known about the conference.
As is so often the case, I’d point to the books such as “Tribes” and “Here Comes Everybody” to explain why an event can have this kind of influence and cascade effect. So, the next time you attend a conference, if you shove your conference manual on your bookshelf and go back to business-as-usual, you’re not even doing yourself any good. Instead, get out into our community and start sharing that knowledge. Often, you’ll get more back than you gave.
