Following the last ELN meeting in Europe (ELN: Laboratory Informatics for the 21st Century, the SMi Group, London, January 2010), a considerable amount of discussion ensued on an ELN LinkedIn Group in which some thoughts were expressed about the role and effectiveness of ELN conferences. The general consensus was that delegate attendances were falling, content was static, and costs were high. Not very encouraging for conference organisers!
Next week the focus falls on the IQPC Smart Labs Exchange meeting in Brussels. Smart Labs offers a different approach to the more conventional conference format with an emphasis on interactive workshops and a limited number of plenary sessions. In addition, the organisers offer pre-arranged meetings between delegates and vendors. It’s a format that has worked well in the past, so it will be interesting to see whether it continues to succeed.
However, in the background, there still remains a question about how the laboratory informatics market collaborates. The conferences do represent an opportunity for users, vendors and consultants to get together now and again, and chew over the various issues and developments in the industry. If the ELN conferences go away, as well they might, these opportunities will go with them, unless, of course, we can find another means of getting interested parties together.
We’ve seen this pattern before with the International LIMS Conferences, and interestingly there still seems to be plenty to discuss about LIMS. The ELN market is still some way from being considered mature, and when it comes to laboratory integration, we’ve hardly started! So where do we go? Is the conference problem one of cost (money or time)? That’s not an unreasonable assumption. Or is the problem content or format? Should we persuade the conference organisers to shift the content from being application-centric and concentrate on integration issues instead? Is it a format problem? Would changing the format to a more interactive approach such as workshop and discussion sessions improve matters? These seem feasible approaches, but would they just retain the same high cost formula and run the risk of low attendance? Or is there another way, by establishing a neutral, low cost forum where people who care about the industry and have something to say, can get together from time to time? Now there’s something to talk about in the networking opportunities in Brussels.
John,
You mention laboratory informatics and integration, but you keep coming back to individual topics, such as LIMS and ELN. My personal opinion is that, while there is plenty left to talk about, probably not enough for individual conferences.
In the LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group (http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36640/6A50095E87BA), a group meant for our entire laboratory informatics industry rather than just single areas of software, we have discussions on a variety of topics, LIMS, ELN, etc… To me, it seems natural to get together in one place. Otherwise, how can we all discuss integration if we don’t understand something about each other’s topics.
As for conferences, there’s another place where I can’t see having one for a single laboratory informatics topic, such as one just for ELN or one just for LIMS. In my own meeting efforts, the groups I’ve been working with in Boston have been having meeting topics that span our industry. I don’t think we could attract enough people if we did only LIMS or only ELN, for example.
By the way, we had had a meeting scheduled with a variety of laboratory informatics topics that we canceled due to snow. It had 105 people signed-up and more planned as walk-ins. We expect the same kinds of numbers for the rescheduled date. These numbers beat the number of laboratory informatics people that show up for some of the big conferences, these days. Local conferences are the new trend, but I believe that they only work in certain geographic areas.
Personally, I don’t want to spend my travel money or my tight time on single-topic conferences. While this is a single person’s view, keep in mind that customers’ conference dollars are smaller — they are less likely to go to multiple conferences than they used to be.