I think we should give this thread the correct title, not have it hiding
behind something else.

If I can add my few pennorth on the subjects of the cost of conferences etc.

The challenge we all face is how to persuade the powers that be that we are
making a good investment by paying for somebody to attend a conference.

What are the benefits of the conference compared with the cost of
attendance?

The benefits are that you get to sit though lots of presentations which
might be relevant to your job function. (I would defy anybody to convince
me that all marketing presentations are that relevant to the audience but
that's the cynic in me speaking). From my experience of attending many
worldwide user conferences, local user group conferences, and Infobahns the
%age of relevant presentations is at most 40%, and is often much less.

Even the Chat With The Labs series of webcasts is becoming difficult to
justify with so much time being spent on the marketing message and so little
time on real technical issues.

OK so you can take certification exams - big deal! What is that worth in
reality.

OK so you can listen to some of the experienced people talking about the
product - that is fine for the speakers but if all they do is to regurgitate
information then it is not that beneficial.

OK so you can network with other users of the product.

And what about the costs:-

Generally a 5 day conference is now around $2000. The cost of travel and
accommodation is roughly the same amount unless you are prepared to catch
flights at ungodly hours and stay in ungodly hotels.

There is also the question of the time away from work. Currently I am sold
out to clients at a rate in excess of $1000 per day.

So a five day conference is realistically going to cost in excess of $9000.



I did make enquiries about going to the conference in Vienna, and the
upcoming one in Anaheim. I was told that if I wanted to attend the
conference I could do so at my own expense and by using my holidays. I can
see my wife's reaction if I tell her I'm taking a week off to attend an IBM
conference and it's going to cost $9,000. (Those of you that know my wife
can guess at her reaction). My only alternative is to publicise the name of
my company by doing a presentation. (Wake up David Williams!) But so far I
have submitted a possible presentation to three conferences and had them
turned down. After all I wanted to talk about the realities of how to
survive disaster recovery and outline some of the reasons why we have failed
to recover from disasters with the promptness that a customer should expect.
(It really is surprising how many things can go wrong when you try to
recover - I can spend many hours talking it if you would all like)


As many of you will know I was a member of the Board of Directors of IIUG
for about 7 years and was part of the board when we first started getting
involved with subsidies from Informix to help with our administration costs.
That was a very difficult decision and is still a very difficult decision.
The challenge facing IIUG was to raise money to fund the services (including
this Newsgroup, the Website, the board meetings etc). We had a choice
between setting an economic membership fee for all members - including those
from the third world where salaries are less than $50 per month - or finding
somebody to subsidise the services. Nowadays we have been able to get
subsidies from other organisations but then we had no choice - there was
only one organisation who were prepared to back us, and then only for a
limited time. The fact that the subsidy continued even when IBM bought
Informix is testament to the work of the board of directors in creating a
model for independent worldwide user groups. OK at times it might seem that
the board is a little too IBM centric but that is really down to the
membership of IIUG making their voice heard and indeendent thinkers being
voted onto the board.

As a result of the activities of the BOD there are now choices of
conferences to attend. The IBM conference, the joint IIUG/IDUG conference,
and numerous local conferences. There are Infobahns, Local User Group
meetings, and even bigger forums like Washington Area Informix Users Group.
The quality of the conference and the relevance of the conference to the
attendees varies according to the type of organisation that runs it. If the
conference is run by VARs it will be more relevant to people who work for
VARs. If the conference is run by IBM then it will be more relevant to the
people who work for IBM - and possibly to people who like hearing a
sanitised message from the supplier. If the conference is run by a group of
enthusiastic amateurs it won't have the same razzamatazz but it might be
more worthwhile.

We all have to make the choice and vote with our attendance. If we don't
attend IBMs conferences they will still run them as some people within IBM
have budgets to spend, but if we don't attend IDUG/IIUG or local user group
meetings they will inevitably fold.

I don't think the BOD should be telling us to attend the IBM conference -
although I have seen no publicity for it other than from IIUG - but we
should really consider if the user organised conferences are what we need,
and if they aren't then let's make them so. But one message I would send to
the IIUG BOD is that any conferences in Europe are expensive for the average
attendee. Unless the csts are reduced the benefit will be outweighed by the
costs of attendance.

So, that was my two pennorth - feel free to shoot me down in flames if you
will.

Regards

Malcolm