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

[Gabriel Scherer]

Dear list,

Last year I played the unfortunate role of complaining about the $100 price
tag on ICFP'20 registration. There were some great improvements in further
events, for example POPL'21 had "discounted rate: $10" as an unconditional
registration option, and PLDI'21 offers the same option. (I still wish that
there events were free, as is common with other scientific conferences like
FSCD'20, IJCAR'20, LICS'20 etc., but $10 is still much closer to a symbolic
sum than $100 for a strict subset of the world.).

Unfortunately, it is my understanding that ICFP'21 is planning to reuse the
same fee structure. The details are not clear yet and possibly subject to
change, as registration hasn't opened; but this seems to be the current
plan. I wish it was possible to have a (public) discussion about this
choice in advance, and not just a month or two before the conference during
summer holidays.

SIGPLAN has decided not to publish budget information for ICFP'20, but my
understanding is that the $100 registration scheme generated a strong
profit for the conference, to the point that, if the costs are comparable
to last year, last year profit would suffice to fund ICFP'21 entirely. Why
would we have a $100 registration fee again?

ICFP is a flagship conference at the intersection of theoretical works and
practical functional programming, and it could attract a vibrant crowd of
people outside academia (in particular: not students), who may not have an
easy path to reimbursement -- this is especially important for the
workshops.

(Disclaimer: I'm criticising past registration fees and prospective
registration fees, but not of course the people doing the hard work of
organizing the conference! They have all my gratitude.)

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 4:05 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>