UKAffy8 Warwick : After the dust has settled…

29th October 2009

 

So, we ended up hosting UKAffy8 at Warwick more by accident than design. It’s probably fair to say that as higher education becomes more ‘marketised’ it becomes increasingly difficult to find lecture theatres available free of charge where we can host a meeting. Happily, this was possible at Warwick, unlike other institutions represented on the committee, but my reservations about hosting also included having just returned to work part-time following maternity leave and increasing pressure to ensure that every hour of every day in our core facility pays for itself. I was told by the department that the meeting was not allowed to make any kind of a loss, which was a little daunting because recent hosts have been left with a deficit of around a few hundred pounds.

The first thing I concentrated on was sponsorship – although the audience is small, we are very specific and companies do seem to be interested in seeing a concentration of core lab personnel in particular. Of course, most sponsors also want to speak, and while often the commercial talks are very interesting, and a great way of keeping up to date with the latest products, a meeting which is too heavy on commercial talks is unlikely to be well-attended. We were exceptionally lucky this year in obtaining sponsorship from 14 companies: Applied Biosystems, Affymetrix, Agilent, Diagenode, GeneGO, Illumina, Ingenuity, Integromics, NuGEN, Partek, Qiagen, Roche, Shimadzu and VWR. You may have noticed that Integromics and Qiagen were unable to attend, so as a gesture of goodwill their sponsorship will be carried over towards a presence at next year’s meeting.

Once I’d reached a minimum target for the sponsorship of a really basic meeting (no biscuits at coffee time, no drinks in the evening!) I focussed on the content. As a core lab who do a lot of work for external users, we don’t often get to hear about publications resulting from our work , so finding speakers ourselves who would be relevant and interesting was very difficult. Here, the rest of the committee helped out no end – either speaking themselves (Paul Heath) or identifying and approaching other speakers to contribute. This approach worked really well, but in the end Alex Forrest-Hay and Jo McGregor from Affymetrix really saved the day – they know so many more people using Affy arrays in new and interesting ways, and were able to approach speakers who we would never have known about. Note to future hosts - I don’t think any speaker that spoke at the meeting was as a result of volunteering through calls to the UKAffy mailing list! In the end, I felt we had a great list of speakers and heard some really interesting talks, so we’re very grateful to all of them, and to the people who helped organise the meeting.

As arrangements progressed, speakers dropped out and new speakers were invited, and also more sponsorship was secured, I began to worry about the practical arrangements. We had a slight problem with room bookings and then the most difficult thing to find was enough tables for the vendors – we had to book another room and steal the tables from there. We were late getting everything to the printers, mainly because we left it too late to close registration – only a week beforehand. Note to future hosts – most people leave it really late to register – be brave and close registration in plenty of time to order catering, programmes and avoid typos such as the one on our lovely cream bags.

I needed lots of help close to the meeting to get the room ready (those tables again), collate delegate packs and make badges. Also, the administrative burden to our department and myself of generating invoices for all of the sponsors, dealing with suppliers’ invoices and expenses claims from the speakers was something I hadn’t quite anticipated, and really did take up a lot time (and still is). Finding a suitable venue for the evening was something we had a small amount of fun with (i.e., a self-funded lab meal out one lunchtime). My first choice was ruled out after a quick Google search found a damning report from the environmental health (hopefully people will thank us for that!), and another possibility was discounted after realising that the most noticeable smell in the bar was the men’s toilets. We settled on Browns – for the pleasant building and safe venue, although we obviously couldn’t account for where anyone headed after the meal (Mike Hubank tried to walk back to Croydon, but luckily circled until he found the hotel instead).

 

So, was it worth it? I hope so. We received lots of positive feedback during and after the meeting, and may even go as far as to say that we enjoyed it ourselves too. Nothing too disastrous happened during the meeting (once Mike turned up on Friday lunchtime with no trip to A&E this year), but some things could have been better (hotel bookings, anyone?).

The meeting will probably be hosted by Paul Heath in Sheffield next year. Several people have approached the committee to say a core lab user’s meeting, not specific to any one platform, may be better attended. This needs to be guided by user input really – UKAffy is great – there are unique features of the meeting. It is not run for profit (this year’s surplus will be transferred to next year’s meeting) and provided you can cover the cost of accommodation and travel, everything else is free, including registration. We certainly attracted enough sponsorship to comfortably cover this and perhaps the biggest worry is the number of delegates – we had 68 non-commercial delegates which is not so different from previous years, but there are more people out there who would be interested to come and share ideas.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who contributed in some way. See you next year!

Enjoy some pictures from the meeting. 

 

Helen Brown is on the UKAffy management committee and runs the Molecular Biology Service at the University of Warwick. Helen and her team organised UKAffy8 in Coventry 17/18th September 2009. 

 

By Helen Brown | Posted in UK Affymetrix | Comments (0)

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