Regards
Ashutosh
Rute Sofia wrote:
> 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.
Good idea!
>
> - 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.
Good idea, it should be included for banquet also.
>
> - 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.
This is a good suggestion. However, some folks would personally like to
keep a copy of the CD/stick. Maybe, one can pay to get a copy in a CD or
USB stick.
On the other hand, Now-a-days, it is very easy to it yourself. Our
publication chair for Sarnoff Symposium saved us thousands of dollars as
she did cleverly produce it herself and we just paid a small amount for
making duplicate CDs. Also, for Xplore you need to provide CDs.
>
> - 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);
There is maintenance involved for *all* the papers submitted (accepted +
rejected) that get reviewed, although there is little bit more
maintenance work for those accepted papers. Thus, asking EDAS to charge
*only* for the accepted papers may not be a fair thing.
>
> 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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