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

[Mehmet Oguz Derin]

Outsider opinion: one good heuristic for pricing anything virtual and
making it accessible for underprivileged individuals is localized video
game & digital subscription prices. Companies expanding these have gone
through many stages regarding price localization (symbolic or not)
globally. - Oguz (Mehmet Oguz Derin)

On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 4:18 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list
> ]
>
> 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.
> >
>