ISA's great change from hosting an annual Expo that was sinking fast to a symposium-with-exhibits they called "Automation Week" is now over and the results are coming in.
Remember that the last Expo had about 8000 attendees, in 2009.
The number of paid conference attendees was approximately 200, with an additional 200 exhibitors who attended the conference, and a number of people who attended the standards meetings, which were at the same time, but not at the same hotel, and of course the exhibitors themselves.
People reported problems finding the venue, and I've talked to a significant number of vendors who exhibited who complained about the exhibit hours (not many-- and closed during the conference sessions), the food (lack of, and lack of places to sit and eat), and the staff support (charitably, could have been a lot better). Many exhibitors tore their stands down early, I'm told. Most members of the press were no-shows, and there were only three new product announcements.
ISA is reporting this as a major success, and has already announced plans to do it again, this time in, of all places, Mobile, Alabama in 2011.
Was Automation Week 2010 a success or a failure? I have an opinion, but you do the math yourself.
The biggest news during Automation Week came not from ISA but from its puppet organization, the Automation Federation, which announced that the tail wags the dog. The very large organization IET, the Institute of Engineering and Technology (www.theiet.org) was announced as the latest member of the Automation Federation, along with the nearly defunct OMAC and WINA, and ISA itself of course. WBF, one of the founding members of the Federation, left earlier this year, citing irreconcilable differences.
IET has over 150,000 members, engineers, scientists and technologists, in 127 countries, with offices in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.
One wonders, since ISA's top leadership spends so much time on Automation Federation, why the heck they don't just sell ISA to IET, and try to make the Automation Federation real. Oh, right. They need ISA's endowment to pay for Automation Federation activities, since AF has virtually no real income. (One ISA leader said recently, "The Automation Federation is a nice hobby, but with ISA's current million dollar per year loss, it is a hobby we can no longer afford.")
Interestingly, as of this writing, I can find no reference to ISA, or the Automation Federation on the IET website. The ISA that is listed is the Independent Safety Assessors.
