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

[Gabriel Scherer]

Dear list,

I would like to come back to a reasonable argument for non-free conference
that was presented here and outside the list: there is a natural idea that
even online conferences require servers, bandwidth, etc., which cost money,
and that participants would pay this cost. However I would contend that (1)
(despite the lack of numbers given by conference organizers) we should
assume that those technical costs are fairly small, (2) the infrastructure
to run online conferences could be made part of common services whose costs
are mutualized, and (3) sponsors *and* our research institutions could
cover those costs.

(1): For conferences in our community that were forced to move online,
being free is the norm, not the exception. PLDI was free, but so were LICS,
FSCD, IJCAR, etc. This suggests that running free is financially
possible/reasonable, and thus that the costs are not very high.

(In addition to the technical cost of the hardware, electricity, network
etc., there are of course human costs associated to having people maintain
the service during the conference period, developing the services
beforehand, and otherwise setup and run the conference. Those are probably
higher than the technical costs (many aspects of it are done by academics
for free, that is, mutualized by their employers). It's hard to say more
without some transparency on online conference budgets. Then again, most
conferences were able to run free.)

(2): Suppose you go to a seminar talk at some university close by; before
the talk, the organizer asks you to pay $20 for the upkeep of the seminar
room, or leave -- you get a link to watch the recorded talk for free. Many
of us would find the demand disturbing; in any case, while maintaining
university buildings does come with large costs, we don't suggest that our
colleagues coming to attend a seminar talk should pay for it.

It is not obvious that attendants of an online research conference should
be the ones paying the cost; it is one choice among several options, and I
think the wrong choice.

Another example: ICFP had 1100 registrants being nice to each other online
for a week, but the #haskell IRC channel on Freenode has 1000+ users
talking to each other all year long. We don't force them to pay for the
Freenode servers before they can access the channel.
(Or this mailing-list, whose costs I assume are generously covered by
UPenn. We are surrounded by services provided by our community with
mutualized costs, which make them much more vibrant, valuable, effective
than if we asked their users to pay to use them.)

(3): Personally I have mixed feelings about the comments on the dangers of
relying too much on our sponsors. I certainly agree with the idea. But I'm
surprised that it comes up now, that we have a chance to turn a fairly
unpleasant conference situation into a least a big jump in accessibility of
our research community (among other nice benefits), while I didn't hear
very much of it in previous years, when conferences had much larger
expenses that required sponsoring. ICFP rented an entire *museum* in Oxford
for one evening,  and then again in Berlin. Were people worrying about
depending on sponsors then? Maybe they were and we just didn't have public
discussions about it; but I think this concern is much less relevant in the
context of online conferences whose costs are substantially lower than for
a physical conference.

If we had some transparent information on the budget required to run our
online conferences, we could also go to our institutions to ask them to
help. My employer, INRIA, has explicit procedures in place to support
scientific events that require funding, I'm sure many others have (see the
list of institutions supporting arxiv.org at
https://arxiv.org/about/ourmembers ). The amount you typically get is lower
than most offers from industrial sponsors; but many universities and
research places around the world would be happy to participate in hosting
and running our conferences, especially if it came with the explicit goal
of making them much more widely accessible.

Best

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.
>>>
>>> >
>>>
>>>