Regional societies: fostering competitive research through virtual infrastructures

[...]many of these larger organizations are finding that it is to their advantage to encourage close relationships with their regional counterparts. At the inaugural 2003 MCBIOS conference, for example, with a theme of "Building Networks," a number of computer scientists attended who were able to find out more about bioinformatics and their possible contribution to life science research; they would probably not have been able to make the investment to attend a national or international meeting on bioinformatics.