The project originated from a collaboration between the Austrian Centre for Social Welfare in Vienna and the Tavistock Institute in London. The Austrian Centre had just finished a large scale eight country enquiry on organizations working on the prevention or amelioration of HIV/Aids. They wanted to find some way of utilizing the extensive data bank that had become available. For details see section 4. The Tavistock Institute specializes in Action Research techniques which aim at translating knowledge into application and it was thought that the "Managing Aids Project" might lend itself to demonstrating the utility of such an approach.