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

[Gabriel Scherer]

Dear Jens Palsberg (and types-list),

In my previous email, I asked for budget summaries for past online SIGPLAN
conferences (PLDI and ICFP, for example; more data is always welcome).
Could SIGPLAN do it?

One inspiring example of financial transparency would be Andreas Zeller's
budget summary for the ISSTA'16 conference (organized by SIGSOFT):

https://andreas-zeller.info/2018/02/01/where-your-conference-fees-go-to.html

On the SIGPLAN blog you mentioned costs and fees as the "elephant in the
room" ( https://blog.sigplan.org/2020/09/15/virtual-conferences-and-sigplan/
). We may have different perspectives looking at different parts of the
elephant; but the "blind men and an elephant" parable relies on the blind
men openly sharing their information.

Best

On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 10:24 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
wrote:

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