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

[Gabriel Scherer]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 4:54 PM Michael Hicks <mwh at cs.umd.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>

On this point I have a simple request: could SIGPLAN release a budget
summary for ICFP and PLDI this year? To have an informed discussion on
online conference fees, we should know the amounts of the varied costs
(including the "good works"), how much money comes in from sponsoring, and
how much comes from conference fees.

Since I raised the question of conference fees I have heard varied
explanations from various people, for example the idea that PLDI was
decided to have free registration before the actual conference-running
costs were known, and that the $100 fee for ICFP adjusts to cover direct
costs better. Your message rather suggests that the direct costs use only a
modest fraction of the $100 (or maybe they can be covered entirely by
sponsorship ?), but we cannot tell without any actual data. Others
suggested that making the conference free was maybe doable for flagship
conferences with an industrial presence such as ICFP or PLDI, but that this
expectation could be problematic for more theoretical conferences with less
sponsors. But then, FSCD and IJCAR reportedly ran fine without registration
costs.

(I don't think this is an outlandish or surprising request, for example I
remember Adam Chlipala making exactly this request during a conference Town
Hall a few years ago.)

On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 10:07 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Mike for bringing clear arguments in favor.
>
> There was an interesting discussion with Nicolai, Henning and Stefan on
> the argument of registration fees helping engagement. I have some short
> points to make on this topic:
>
> 1. This exact argument (price signals value) is given by some high-ranked
> universities in the English-speaking part of the world that charge tens of
> thousands of dollars of tuition fee and *could* relatively easily cover the
> corresponding costs on their endowment money.
>
> 2. Just like for tuition fees, the slope is slippery. Mike mentioned $25
> (for non-students) to help engagement by making the conference feel
> valuable, but now ICFP cost $100; one could argue for POPL'21 registration
> fees of $1000 for non-students, to make it *very* valuable as a conference.
> (As long as the people making pricing decisions are getting reimbursed for
> their registration fees, I guess we could pull this off?
>
> However, I think that this discussion on engagement is somewhat of a
> distraction. Having conference where people participate actively is
> certainly a good thing, it is *nice*. But sharing our knowledge and results
> in the most open way possible is *a core tenet of our duty as researchers*.
> For me it is clear that we should find *other* ways to help engagement that
> do not raise the barrier to entry to our conference, because the later is
> sensibly more important than the former.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 4:54 PM Michael Hicks <mwh at cs.umd.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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>
>> 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>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> >
>>>
>>>