[TYPES] Why are ACM conference registrations so expensive now?

[Gardner, Philippa A]

Hi all,

I will report at the POPL’24  business meeting about the  registration in more detail. This is just a quick email as I am deluged with organisational emails right now.

In the UK, we have to pay tax (VAT 20%), in the US we do not as ACM is a US charity.  I do not know why it  is not possible for ACM to be considered a charitable  status in the UK, but it isn’t. I will bring this up at the POPL SC meeting. The POPL’24 figures  are about the same before VAT  as POPL last year and ICSE in the US. 

We got 30% off the venue as we are doing an academic conference. We actually got a good deal. 

Cost of living has gone up meaning that venues are more expensive. 

The industry chairs did a good  job and we have good industry support. However, if you look at the sponsors,  you will see some obvious companies that we expected to get are missing. They asked us to get back to them in September and then the funding did not materialise. We timed registration to be  open when the papers were finalised in part because we were hoping to get this extra funding.
We stripped everything to the bone and I persuaded ACM to work with high registration numbers for the figures, and we got to the registration figures as low as we could. 

It looks as if the registration numbers are going to be more than we predicted. We will know better after the early registration deadline.  This means that the stuff we stripped out to get the lowest figure,  we can probably put back, at least in part.  The point is that, even though we can expect the numbers to be good in London,  it is really difficult to predict at the moment. ACM understandably needs to be cautious about numbers, especially as we don’t fully understand what’s happening with reluctance to travel due to  COVID and  the climate situation. 

We can choose to go outside London; I do think London brings huge advantages which is why made my choice. We can choose to go to a cheaper country; maybe this is something that the SC might explore, specifically thinking about costs. 

It is the case that many of us have worked extremely hard to get the registration costs as low as we could  in quite challenging circumstances. 

Best wishes,
Philippa

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Professor Philippa Gardner FREng
Department of Computing
Imperial College 
180 Queen’s Gate
London
SW7 2AZ



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> On 13 Dec 2023, at 12:03, Neel Krishnaswami <nk480 at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I just registered for POPL, and the total cost was over 2000 USD. This seems really high, and it seems something that has gotten a lot worse over the last year or two. For example, ICFP a few months ago was 1500 USD, and POPL last year was 1375 USD.
> 
> Does anyone know what factors have been driving up the cost of our conferences up so quickly? I'm worried we're making our events inaccessible to anyone but the best-funded researchers and institutions.
> 
> Best,
> Neel
>