[TYPES] online conferences should be free (was: global debriefing over our virtual experience of conferences)

[Henning Basold]

On 24/08/2020 02:14, Nicolai Kraus wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 8:23 PM Henning Basold
> <h.basold at liacs.leidenuniv.nl <mailto:h.basold at liacs.leidenuniv.nl>> wrote:
> 
>     I would like to add another way of covering costs that is often used
>     in communal places: Anyone gives whatever they can, which may be
>     nothing. This assumes of course some fairness and some transparency
>     about the costs.
> 
> 
> "Pay what you want/can" is in many situations a nice model and I'm
> confident that transparency/fairness wouldn't be an issue in this
> community. But the problem is that conference fees are in most cases
> paid from grants and not privately. Grant holders have some
> responsibility to spend their budget in a way that benefits the funded
> project most, and in many cases, it's essentially taxpayers' money.
> Asking people to be generous with essentially public money would give
> rise to all sorts of ethical problems and actual questions. 
> As an example, I've read in the rules of a funding agency that you can't
> pay for CO2 offset if that's a voluntary option when you buy your flight
> ticket. I first thought that this was an unfortunate rule, but it
> actually makes sense: This public money was allocated to research. Had
> the government (or whoever is responsible) thought that the money was
> better spent on CO2 reduction, then they could have done that instead.
> As a grant holder, one just isn't entitled to spend the money on
> environmental protection (even if that might benefit the public more
> than the actual research project).
> I guess it's debatable, but I don't think "pay what you want" works
> here. However, it does work to say "registration is €200, but you can
> also choose free registration if you don't have a grant/access to travel
> budget or are in a similar situation; choose at your discretion."
>  

This is indeed an issue with our funding model and the potential ethical
issues could be resolved, if there was any political will; but let us
leave this for another discussion. I think the model could be refined a
bit from pay all or nothing to a pay scale, with the option of no
payment, that may be linked with some criteria that allow the registrant
to justify the selection to their funding agency. I think, we could, as
a community, come up with some standard criteria that can employed by
event organisers.

> 
>     The problem with the LICS model is that it also prevents publication
>     for some people, if they cannot collaborate with someone who has money.
> 
> 
> Agreed, but this is not in any way a new problem. I think the LICS model
> was very reasonable and pragmatic given the circumstances. That doesn't
> mean that we can't come up with an even better solution if we discuss
> this as a community.
>  

Certainly not, and it has become ever more visible with paid open
access, where publishers asked for astronomical fees. And yes, I think
we can, and need to, come up with better solutions.

> 
>     That things with a higher price are perceived to be to of higher
>     quality is unfortunately true. But do we have to reproduce this kind
>     of marketing within our scientific community?
> 
> 
> I don't think "reproduce" is the right word, it's an unfortunate reality
> which we can take into account. Or we can choose to ignore this reality
> and hope that it works. I think it could work.
>  

I use the word "reproduce" purposefully because this kind of reality
descends merely from our society and is not an absolute truth. Many
scientists do value free publications platforms very highly, and often
more so than certain paid journals. The key here is the community
network that surrounds such a platform. It is, therefore, not the
scientific community that is an issue but whatever institutions at whose
grace they are for positions, pay cheques, funding etc. Fortunately,
there are changes happening, like the DORA agreement
(https://sfdora.org/). Changing the mindset from "quality must be
expensive" to other criteria will also contribute to changing other
issue, like the peer reviewing process at competitive conferences and
the issue of competition and patriarchy itself, which have been
discussed previously in this thread.

> 
>     Lastly, I would like to also mention the excellent journal LMCS
>     (logical methods in CS), which has a very strong board and rolling
>     deadlines. This journal implements many of the suggestions already
>     successfully.
> 
> 
> Thanks for this comment! There will also be a public discussion on the
> publication culture in our communities (I've forwarded the invitation to
> the panel debate to this mailing list earlier today).
> 

I'm looking forward to this discussion, and I hope that we can find, as
a community, solutions to pressing issues and move forward.

Best,
Henning

> Best wishes
> Nicolai
> 
>  
> 
> 
>     On 23 August 2020 18:35:34 CEST, Nicolai Kraus
>     <nicolai.kraus at gmail.com <mailto:nicolai.kraus at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>         [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
> 
>         Interesting discussion, and definitely very important!
>         My opinion is:
> 
>         (1) Registration costs should not stop anyone from attending a/an [online]
>         conference. I guess that's obvious and solutions for this were implemented
>         for physical conferences.
> 
>         (2) I accept Mike's point about free things not being valued as highly as
>         paid things. But I think even a small symbolic fee could potentially be a
>         hurdle for some people. The issue is that the value of $25 (or €25 or £25
>         or whatever) is very subjective. For those senior people who are important
>         for the conference and who are the ones that junior members want to meet,
>         $25 is likely to be negligible. For the junior participants, it might not
>         be. This is just the wrong way round since the junior participants probably
>         benefit most from the meeting and don't need this sort of encouragement. Of
>         course, the perceived value of $25 will also greatly depend on whether
>         someone has access to academic travel budget. Finally, we shouldn't forget
>         that a significant part of the world population (online sources say 25%, no
>         idea how accurate this is) has no access to a bank account which makes even
>         a fee of $0.01 a problem. Someone with this background could not attend a
>         physical conference, but they might have access to the internet. I don't
>         know whether we will actually have such participants, but we (we = the
>         privileged inhabitants of developed countries) would be ignorant if we
>         dismissed the possibility.
> 
>         (3) I'm against relying on industrial sponsors. How much advertisement at
>         conferences is acceptable? It's hard to draw a line, and this could get out
>         of hand. Moreover, this route of funding might not be available for some
>         more theory-focussed conferences, and I assume it would in general benefit
>         large/prestigious conferences much more than small/new meetings.
> 
>         (4) I actually liked the model that LICS used. Participants could choose
>         between free registration and paid registration, with the condition that
>         each paper came with one paid registration to cover the publication costs.
>         I believe we could instead simply say that people with access to travel
>         budget are kindly asked to opt for the paid registration. I do think that
>         this would quite easily cover the costs for the conference.
> 
>         Best,
>         Nicolai
> 
>         On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 3:58 PM Michael Hicks <mwh at cs.umd.edu <mailto:mwh at cs.umd.edu>> wrote:
> 
>             [ The Types Forum,
>             http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list
>             ]
> 
>             Thanks for raising this issue. Just a few points about the
>             other side of
>             the argument:
> 
>             It’s well known that things that are free are not valued (by
>             humans) as
>             much as those that cost something, even a small amount. For
>             example, see
>             Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” which presents the
>             results of several
>             experiments that demonstrate this. As a relevant case: Free
>             MOOCs tended to
>             have lots of “sign ups” but far fewer attendees, and even
>             fewer completers.
> 
>             As such, if the goal is to have engaged attendees, trying to
>             come closer to
>             the experience of traditional conferences, it might make
>             sense to charge
>             something, even a small amount like $25, for at least some
>             of the
>             population. This population might be people who have lots of
>             social capital
>             already, and are generally busy, so they are more likely to
>             blow off the
>             conference if they paid nothing for signing up. Such people
>             might be those
>             that more junior attendees wish to meet.
> 
>             I note that engaged attendance was a goal when we had in-person
>             conferences, so I don’t see why we’d want to drop it now.
>             Indeed, if people
>             don’t want to be engaged the videos will be available for
>             free, afterward.
> 
>             Beyond the modest fees to run an online conference, which
>             Talia mentions,
>             conference registration payments serve other purposes. Any
>             surplus goes to
>             SIGPLAN, which turns around this surplus as good works,
>             e.g., paying the
>             open access fees for PACMPL, which ICFP benefits from. It
>             also makes
>             donations to CRA-W, OPLSS, etc. and provides scholarships
>             for PLMW.
> 
>             Corporate sponsors can indeed pay some costs, but they also
>             have downsides.
>             We are finding that many sponsors are not interested in
>             necessarily giving
>             that much, and some are starting to make demands on how the
>             conference is
>             run for their modest donation. This is a slippery slope that
>             the SIGPLAN EC
>             is trying to avoid.
> 
>             Given that PLDI was completely free and ICFP followed a
>             progressive fee
>             schedule, I’ll be curious to compare the ICFP outbrief with
>             that of PLDI’s,
>             to see how the registration fee affected attendance.
> 
>             Thanks,
>             -Mike
> 
>             On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 10:25 AM Talia Ringer
>             <tringer at cs.washington.edu <mailto:tringer at cs.washington.edu>>
>             wrote:
> 
>                 [ The Types Forum,
> 
>             http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list
> 
>                 ]
> 
> 
> 
>                 I don't know about PLDI, but there are some costs
>                 associated with online
> 
>                 events. For example, automatic captioning software is
>                 still not very good
> 
>                 (Google's always turns "proofs" into "fruits" for me).
>                 Live captioning is
> 
>                 really expensive! But it's also hugely important for
>                 disability
> 
>                 accessibility.
> 
> 
> 
>                 For students, ICFP was essentially free. I do agree that
>                 in principle,
> 
>                 online conferences should be free, and online components
>                 of hybrid
> 
>                 conferences should be free or strongly discounted. In
>                 practice, though, I
> 
>                 do think that will mean finding sponsors for hidden
>                 costs that really are
> 
>                 necessary.
> 
> 
> 
>                 On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 7:07 AM Gabriel Scherer <
> 
>             gabriel.scherer at gmail.com <mailto:gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
> 
>                 wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>                     [ The Types Forum,
> 
>                 http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list
> 
>                     ]
>                     Dear types-list,
>                     Going on a tangent from Flavien's earlier post: I
>                     really think that
> 
>                 online
> 
>                     conferences should be free.
>                     Several conferences (PLDI for example) managed to
>                     run free-of-charge
> 
>                 since
> 
>                     the pandemic started, and they reported broader
>                     attendance and a strong
>                     diversity of attendants, which sounds great. I don't
>                     think we can
> 
>             achieve
> 
>                     this with for-pay online conferences.
>                     ICFP is coming up shortly with a $100 registration
>                     price tag, and I did
> 
>                 not
> 
>                     register.
>                     I'm aware that running a large virtual conference
>                     requires computing
>                     resources that do have a cost. For PLDI for example,
>                     the report only
> 
>             says
> 
>                     that the cost was covered by industrial sponsors.
>                     Are numbers publicly
>                     available on the cost of running a virtual
>                     conference? Note that if we
>                     managed to run a conference on free software, I'm
>                     sure that
> 
>             institutions
> 
>                     and volunteers could be convinced to help hosting
>                     and monitoring the
>                     conference services during the event.
> 
>