International Congress Calendar Online User Guide

Criteria for inclusion of meetings

The International Congress Calendar Online covers over 390,000 meetings from 1851 to 2025, and includes approximately 10,000 future meetings every year. Earlier data collection by the UIA covers meetings back to 1681.

Included in the database are the key meetings:

  • organized or sponsored by international associations, i.e. international non-governmental organizations (INGOS) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that are included in the Yearbook of International Organizations
  • which are not organized or sponsored by international organizations but nonetheless are of significant international character, notably those organized by national organizations and national branches of international organizations
  • which are national meetings with a large international participation

Excluded from the database are:

  • purely national meetings, as well as those of an exclusively religious, didactic, political, commercial or sporting nature, such as religious gatherings, courses, party conferences, sales meetings, contests, etc
  • meetings with strictly limited participation, such as those of subsidiary (internal) statutory bodies, committees, groups of experts, etc, of which the greatest proportion are held at an intergovernmental level and take place at the headquarters of the large IGOs
  • corporate and incentive meetings, the survey of commercial activities and markets being outside the UIA’s scope

The information in the database is biased by the UIA’s restriction to:

  • meetings organized by non-commercial and non-profit organizations, though these may still include meetings concerned with commercially relevant topics such as those of professional, trade and industry associations, and meetings organized by non-profit organizations in order to generate revenue
  • publicly announced meetings, thereby excluding unpublicized, secret and closed events
  • meetings reported within the time frame permitting their inclusion in the database
  • participation figures generally being those indicated pre-meeting, not post-meeting

The meetings data compiled by the UIA is analyzed in great detail in an extensive annual report (International Meetings Statistics) provided to UIA Associate Members as part of their subscription. This statistical review is also available to the general public three months after it has been released to the Associate Members.

What is an international organization?

The Yearbook of International Organizations, which profiles the organizations whose meetings are a focus of this Calendar, catalogues all “non-profit” “international” “organizations” according to a broad range of criteria. It therefore includes many bodies that may be perceived, according to narrower definitions, as not being fully international, or as not being organizations as such, or as not being of sufficient significance to merit inclusion. Such bodies are nevertheless included so as to enable users to make their own evaluation in the light of their own criteria.

The editors of the Yearbook are sensitive to the existence of forms of social organization that may substitute for the creation of a more formal or conventional organizations. A conference series with no continuing committee is one example.

The definition of “profit-making”, and the extent to which any “non-profit organization” may incidentally or deliberately make a profit as defined by particular tax regimes, cannot be unambiguously resolved. This grey area has been treated in a variety of ways with the sensitivity it merits. The editors are attentive to the nonprofit objectives of an organization registered under for-profit legal status. Especially problematic are the professional and trade organizations whose existence is in part justified, in their members’ eyes, by the extent to which they defend or improve the members’ income. That said, bodies that are unambiguously constituted as “for profit” are excluded from the Yearbook.

The editors acknowledge that some types of international organization may be totally absent or underreported in the Yearbook, such as virtual organizations associated with the internet (including those of otherwise conventional structure, and also “usenets”, web discussion groups, “listserv” communities, etc), criminal networks, cartels and price-fixing rings, mercenary groups, spy and undercover organizations, terrorist organizations, secret societies, religious sects, family and fraternity groups, bodies with no formal structure or fixed address, or associations essentially constituted by a journal subscribership.

The editors have always given priority to bodies that are not focused on, or deriving from, a particular country. This may be construed as under-reporting of certain forms of aid, missionary activity, language and cultural activities, and so on.

The editors have traditionally stressed the importance of involvement of three countries on a more-or-less equal footing, to the exclusion of bi-lateral international bodies and those in which a particular country is dominant. Indications of “internationality” include distribution of board members, location of meetings, rotation of secretariat, source of finance, and membership.