Organising drinks in a brewery

Let me start by saying that I know from experiences within my own office that organising a conference is a stressful and time-consuming business.

However tough it may be though, the key issue is to ensure you have speakers arranged and that they are people of integrity, who will be there when you need them in order to make the entire event a success.

Which makes me wonder both about some conference organisers and their supposedly esteemed guests, who seem as though they couldn`t be bothered to turn up, even if they have already committed to an event.

I recently attended several major telecoms conferences where it has actually been impossible to plan your schedule - which may not be a problem for a delegate attending the entire event, but when you`re a journalist who has to constantly dash in and out of presentations in order to meet your deadline, it becomes a serious cause for concern.

As a journalist, you get the event programme well beforehand and plan which presentations you feel will bring the most value to your readers. You then attend them and leave immediately afterwards, in order to make your deadline.

So it is desperately frustrating when you arrive for the presentation you have marked out as being of interest, only to find that it was held an hour earlier, because the previous speaker had failed to pitch up.

Or worse still, you arrive and sit around waiting for 20 minutes, because the delegate you have come to hear has other business and has decided to not bother turning up at the conference.

I understand something like this is seldom the fault of the organisers, although one would like to think they would get some kind of assurance that the speaker will be there or will at least send an adequate replacement, but it still rankles.

Particularly when the event is a three-day conference and the organisers - having experienced so much hassle on the first day - do not appear to do anything about making certain that their remaining delegates will arrive, or at the very least providing visitors with a new schedule showing how the speakers have been reshuffled.

Meaning that the following day, you are once again stuck in the same boat, arriving for a presentation that has either been cancelled or randomly rescheduled.

By the same token, one has to worry about the level of professionalism within our ICT industry, when players who are undoubtedly key figures both in their company and the sector don`t bother to arrive for an event they had obviously already agreed to make a presentation at.

Somehow I cannot see Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or Sir Richard Branson doing something as unprofessional as that.

One has to worry about the level of professionalism within our ICT industry.

Rodney Weidemann, Telecoms editor, ITWeb

While we`re on the subject of conference organisers, surely the people who arrange these events WANT the media there?

After all, we provide them with the pre-event publicity and the ongoing stories that keep their event in the public eye throughout its duration, which generally leads to a successful conference and an opportunity for them to do the same thing again the following year.

So if they like the media and want us to attend, why are some of them so 'cheap` as to not provide journalists with parking vouchers when they insist on holding an event at a convention centre that charges extortionate parking fees?

While journalists are traditionally poor people, the real issue I have with this is sometimes these events are a complete waste of time for us, but we still make an effort to be there in order to try and get the story, which in turn generates publicity for the organisers.

And I always believed that in situations like this, the one hand was supposed to wash the other.