Assessing the Ethical, Social and Environmental Performance of Conferences

Abstract

There is a rising demand for assessing the performance of organisations on ethical, social and environmental (ESE) topics. Ethical, social and environmental accounting (ESEA) is common practice in many types of organisations and initiatives. Currently, scientific conferences are not in the spotlight nor feeling pressure to disclose their ESE accounts. However, proactively adopting these practices is an opportunity to lead the way and show commitment and responsibility. Since no existing ESEA method fits the domain of conferences well, this paper presents preliminary results on engineering such a method. We discuss material ESE topics for conferences, key performance indicators, measurement and data collection methods, and ICT infrastructure. We illustrate the method concepts by applying it to the RCIS conference series. We are confident that conference organisers and scientific communities will start assessing the performance of their conferences under many organisational sustainability dimensions and, what is more important, initiate reflection processes to improve such performance over the years.