The profile of an International Meeting

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the professional profile of participants in the “ACAST Colloquium”, one of the preliminary conferences leading to the United Nations Advisory Committee on Application of Science and Technology to Development (UNCSTD) meeting in Vienna in August of 1979, in order to study the different profile parameters of developing and “developed” country participants. We found that the developing countries seem to have a higher proportion of women and younger people than the “developed” countries. Participants on the whole tended to be older than a cross-section of the scientific and technological community. Approximately three-quarters considered themselves to be scientists rather than technologists. The scientists tended to be involved in some way with R & D, scientific or technological education, as well as management and administration. On the whole, the distribution of various parameters investigated was quite similar for developing and “developed” countries. Some interpretations of these results are offered.