[TYPES] Could we temporarily stop having conferences in the US?

[Sam Lindley]

On 23/09/2025 07:10, Wouter Swierstra wrote:
[..]
> Looking ahead, one idea might be to align the location of the
> different PACM PL conferences better -- for instance, ensuring that
> there is at least one conference in the US and Europe each year.
> Allowing presentations across different conferences (presenting a
> POPL paper at PLDI or visa versa), would make it easier for
> researchers to present their work at venue they can attend. This does
> require a bit of co-ordination at the SIGPLAN level - and it is not
> yet clear to me how much support there is for such an initiative.

There is now a shared SIGPLAN conference planning spreadsheet that the
SIGPLAN SC Chairs should have access to, which should in theory enable
better coordination over geographic location than there has been in the
past.

I'm not aware that any guidelines have been agreed, but I think
something along the lines that Wouter suggests would make sense. I don't
think there's anything particularly special about calendar years, so I'd
suggest striving to guarantee that 1 in every X major SIGPLAN conference
(POPL, PLDI, ICFP, SPLASH) is held in Europe, 1 in every Y in North
America, and 1 in every Z in Asia, for suitable values of X, Y, and Z.
(Perhaps other parts of the world should be explicitly included too, but
it's currently quite rare for SIGPLAN conferences to be held in other
continents.) I'm not sure about Z, but I'd suggest X and Y should be no
more than 4. In recent years we have failed to satisfy this (rather
conservative seeming) constraint for regularly holding major conferences
in North America and Europe, and will do so again next year, but
conference locations are typically chosen two years in advance, so any
change will take a while to filter through.

Sam
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