As cforde notes, you have to justify the cost of the trip, and you might be able to do that by bringing back more than just a wiser self. You might try picking a few presentations from the schedule that you expect to be significant to your company's particular operation, and offer to do talks at your shop on these topics (e.g. "How Perl 6 will affect our work"). You can also circulate this list to others before you leave to see if they can suggest any burning relevant questions that they'd like to be addressed, for which you will try to bring back the answers. You can argue that even though you don't know what you will learn, the congregation of that many experts in one place is bound to give you valuable insight that you can bring back to the company's advantage. Giving informal summary talks and/or writing conference notes upon returning from a trip have been pretty standard practices at places I've worked, but I don't know if it will be effective for you.

In my (non-IT) experience, the conference participation principle that cforde describes does seem to apply. Most companies I have worked for will pay for employees who have had papers and/or presentations accepted, presuming the conference is relevant to the business of course (and hence I won't be attending 8-().

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

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