> The budget wasn't hypothetical; it is "representative". Discussing an
> individual budget isn't useful. E.g., some budgets give us free WiFi in
> exchange for meeting room fees, others give us meeting rooms free but
> expect high food costs. It's very easy to get entangled in those
> details, which are not useful in directing future budget actions.
In addition, many of the costs depend on the number of people registering (naturally, some fixed costs and some that have price breaks or volume discounts). Thus, it is not unusual for a conference to decide to add (or remove) features, such as lunches, as the number of registrations becomes clearer. At least for all but the largest conferences, all of these decisions are made by the general chairs (and sometimes the steering committee), all of whom are volunteers. They are not made by the IEEE (or ACM). Thus, I find it unhelpful to make IEEE or ACM into some kind of bogeyman that's trying to goose conference revenue. As long was chairs meet the budgetary requirements and are not taking undue risks, such as relying on uncertain corporate sponsorships, IEEE and ACM HQ will go along with the budget.
I do think it's helpful to make chairs and steering committees more cost conscious. As I noted before, today's all-inclusive arrangements are at least an implicit reaction to what was perceived as not-so-great practices a decade ago, where, for example, students would get no conference food, did not get to participate in the social event and were otherwise treated as second-class participants. The inclusive pricing helps in ensuring that everybody can participate in these events, rather than having to worry whether the company or university will reimburse the social event. After all, "networking" in the human sense is one of the major goals of a conference. We don't need conferences to disseminate PowerPoint slides and ask one question in the two-minute Q&A period.
I generally found Fred's number matching my experience (having organized three events in 2009), with the usual caveat emphasized by Joe that every hotel and city is different.
As Joe and others have been pointing out, the major cost of the conference is often the hotel and the flight (and, for some countries, exacerbated by the unfavorable exchange rate - Europe is very expensive right now for US attendees, even though it may not feel that way for Europeans). I think good advice from professionals as to the likely cost impact of the choice of location would be useful in helping steering committees. Having been on steering committees, I know that this type of information is often lacking when making conference location decisions.
These professionals are likely to work at the societies - indeed, ACM HQ has indicated that they are willing to help conferences with that type of advice. Again, somebody has to pay for this service, given that most researchers are not travel agents.
>
> Reductions in Comsoc expenses thus don't impact conference registration
> costs that much.
>
One point of evidence is that (Globecom and ICC possibly excepted) that CS/EE conferences organized by other professional organizations are roughly similar. To pick one at random (top of their web page), Usenix charges $760 for its Conference on File and Storage Technologies (San Jose).
> As to the benefits Comsoc BoG members receive, keep in mind that these
> are unpaid positions. If you were elected to an office, and it was a
> requirement to attend meetings with flights longer than 6 hours, would
> you agree to attend if you were required to travel coach?
>
> I'm not arguing for any of these decisions. I am noting that focusing on
> these issues is not the most productive way to reduce registration costs.
Also, it should be noted that very few universities in the US will be willing to take the financial risk for a non-trivial-sized conference. Thus, you need an organization to take that risk - I suspect none of the posters to this discussion would suddenly want to find themselves liable for $100k if the conference they are chairing has to be cancelled or something else unexpected happens. Any organization has overhead - staff, insurance and other infrastructure has to be paid for, after all. (Indeed, NSF pays overhead for every research grant, so they are well familiar with the concept - except that most universities charge 40 to 75%...)
>
> Agreed. Note that this further requires facilities to support realtime
> videoconferencing - which can require additional cost at the meeting
> (more than just email bandwidths, video cameras, people to run the video
> cameras), and assumes that the authors are in locations with resources
> to make such presentations (both bandwidth and equipment). It is
> certainly worth looking into, though.
>
I've done a few remote presentations (typically, as invited speaker, never for a regular paper) at conferences or other events. It kind of works, but it is a distinctly second-rate experience for both sides, in my view. Technology is still somewhat dicey - making audience questions work is difficult without lots of experience (acoustic echo cancellation and such), particularly if you're operating in an environment that is not under your control, i.e., your typical conference hotel. (We discussed this extensively in the IEEE committee on travel cost reduction.) On more than one occasion, WebEx or Yuuguu suddenly froze, leaving the speaker (me...) scrambling madly, and the audience sitting there twiddling their thumbs.
The IETF has been trying this in various ways recently, with rather mixed results. And they have a dedicated staff, made up of some of the most experienced network admins in the business, and they often run dedicated network connectivity (a Gigabit or so) to the conference site. As we all know, we still struggle to get our laptops to sync with the projector on occasion...
Also, it doesn't really scale. You can have a few remote presentations, but I suspect nobody would show up for a conference if they knew that half the talks would be piped in remotely. Thus, at the moment, this is probably something best considered a special case. For example, we had a remote keynote presentation at ICNP, since the speaker fell ill at the last minute.
Henning
_______________________________________________
Tccc mailing list
Tccc@lists.cs.columbia.edu
https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/cucslists/listinfo/tccc
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment