Attendance at the HL7 Meeting Somewhat Lower than Hoped

May 3rd, 2007 by Dave Shaver

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Although the final numbers are not yet announced, it appears that attendance at the May 2007 HL7 Working Group Meeting in Cologne, Germany will reach a total of approximately 375 people over the course of the week. This is a bit lower than a typical meeting where there are between 400 and 550 attendees. The lower turnout contributed to the conference not meeting the hotel room block requirements.

The good news is that I did not hear anyone indicate that committee work was held up by the lower turnout. Some argued that fewer people actually made things go faster!

There was some discussion and conjecture about why attendance was lower at the Cologne meeting. Several ideas were floated, and I think they all contributed towards the lower turnout - for example, “overseas travel” sparks challenges for some United States attendees and their corporate travel policies; the US dollar is weak against the Euro so things were “overly expensive;” the conference fell during a week with a national German holiday (which occurred on Tuesday); and we did not do enough “internal marketing” of the venue, etc.

Picking a venue is really difficult and the HL7 staff does an excellent job. The biggest challenge with HL7 meetings is that they require a very large number of meeting rooms to hold the intense mixture of committee meetings and tutorials to address the HL7 Standard. This means that the HL7 conference must guarantee a pretty large block of hotel rooms.

The next WGM is in Atlanta during September. I hope to see you there!