Conference for 'knowledge confluence'

I receive information about different health care and professional conferences by post and mail regularly. In October alone, I received brochures for thirteen of them, mostly related to my specialty.

I happened to meet the organiser of this conference, whose display board, you find in this post.

He described the conference as an occasion of 'knowledge confluence'

I have been skeptical of some professional conferences ever since the conferences became expensive and evolved to be more of social and business occasions. I still go when I  am invited to speak. In most of the conferences, excepting for the very special sessions, a good number would drift away from the hall to do 'many other things'. Also with conferences running parallel sessions, the focus has shifted to offer many thematic presentations to satisfy the needs of the interest groups, who would prefer to focus only on their areas of interest.  

In the earlier days, the conference was also a time for fellowship, net working, personal exchange of ideas with other colleagues for clarification and problem solving. This occurs much less now a  days. 

I have often wondered about the future of  the conferences!  I suspect the big conferences would  continue to go on. But those who want to develop net working with fellow researchers would organise separate forum to meet in small groups. 

I know of  small group of clinical biochemistry professionals, who used to meet during the summer in Kodiakanal for four days for exchange of views, much before the clinical Biochemisty association was formed. One of the regular attendees referring to those meetings said,'we learned form each other and grew in respect for each other and looked forward to the meeting'.

I feel regular video conferencing would be an equivalent of that, if we want to develop a collegium of like minded professionals.

M.C.Mathew(text and photograph)