Re: [Tccc] Cost of attendance from developing countries / in general

Hello,

In regards to the cost issue being raised (because the quality of
presentations is another issue) I back up Henning's suggestions for
immediate actions. They will not solve the problem completely but will
for sure assist in lowering some barriers.

Would also add some items to Henning's list:

- Move the awards/panels/ social event to the last day of the conference.

- in terms of fees with coffee-breaks, etc., rely on a voucher system
and let people online decide whether or not to go for it. This is
already available on some conferences.

- stop providing people with conference merchandising in paper/CD/memory
stick format. Simply provide an URL to the participants, where they can
download all the conference information.

- EDAS costs (which also count for the events that use it and that are
possibly the majority of the cases) should charge based on the number of
papers accepted (and not submitted);

BR,
Rute

> I suspect there are several things we can do easily and quickly:
>
> - Get advice on "cheap" cities; Minneapolis in winter (site of many IETF meetings) was chosen for this reason. Nobody can accuse the attendees of a junket in that case, either. In my limited experience, the cheapest cities are 2nd tier cities (i.e., *not* London, NY, Paris, Beijing, Delhi, Tokyo) served by multiple air carriers, in the off-season. They usually offer a range of hotel options within walking or mass-transit distance, while still being easy to reach without three or four air-hops or extensive bus and train trips (or car rentals). Site proposals should provide an indication whether<$100 hotel options are within easy reach.
>
> - Conferences should announce their rough fees (say, +/- $50) at the time of submission, not after papers have been accepted. That way, I can tell my students not to submit a paper to a $1000/attendee conference.
>
> - Have conferences publish their budget, at least in outline form.
>
> - Ask attendees whether they prefer the social event to be 'a la carte', i.e., as an option. (You'll divide attendees into first-class and steerage, but, as Joe keeps pointing out, you can't ask for all the goodies and then complain about the price.)
>
> - Establish a rough conference fee guideline (something like "should be no more than $200/day"), and make it part of the TC approval process.
>
> - Consider whether combining multiple events in one venue can help reduce travel expenses. SIGCOMM and Infocom are doing this to some extent, for example.
>
> - Consider two-day instead of three-day events, e.g., with the help of poster sessions. (You could imagine a bidding process: if you speak as an author, you have to spend points, and you get some number of points from the audience; if you don't have enough points, your next presentation is a poster -- I'm [somewhat] kidding here.)
>
> - Establish clear guidelines on volunteer (chairs, steering committee, staff) and keynote speaker reimbursements/honoraria.
>
> - Where feasible, consider universities or research labs for hosting events. (Labs often have good facilities, but the details can be tricky. We tried to host a mid-sized events at a Seattle-area lab, but the organization charges for the larger lecture rooms, and hotels in the immediate vicinity were scarce and would have required attendees to rent a car. All the major labs in the US that I can think of are in the suburbs, from Bell Labs, AT&T and IBM to Microsoft.)
>
> I suspect that the biggest expense is not each conference, but the number of events that people are supposed to attend. My gut feeling is that the standard "custom" for academics a decade or two ago was that you went to one discipline-wide event a year, where you met all your colleagues, and one specialty event (a workshop in your narrow research specialty).
>
> As I mentioned in an earlier message, all of these are tweaking. Personally, I think we need to reconsider how we run things on a larger scale, rather than worrying about the number of coffee breaks at our conferences.
>
> Henning
>
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