[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
Outsider opinion: one good heuristic for pricing anything virtual and making it accessible for underprivileged individuals is localized video game & digital subscription prices. Companies expanding these have gone through many stages regarding price localization (symbolic or not) globally. - Oguz (Mehmet Oguz Derin) On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 4:18 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.sche...@gmail.com> wrote: > [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list > ] > > Dear list, > > Last year I played the unfortunate role of complaining about the $100 price > tag on ICFP'20 registration. There were some great improvements in further > events, for example POPL'21 had "discounted rate: $10" as an unconditional > registration option, and PLDI'21 offers the same option. (I still wish that > there events were free, as is common with other scientific conferences like > FSCD'20, IJCAR'20, LICS'20 etc., but $10 is still much closer to a symbolic > sum than $100 for a strict subset of the world.). > > Unfortunately, it is my understanding that ICFP'21 is planning to reuse the > same fee structure. The details are not clear yet and possibly subject to > change, as registration hasn't opened; but this seems to be the current > plan. I wish it was possible to have a (public) discussion about this > choice in advance, and not just a month or two before the conference during > summer holidays. > > SIGPLAN has decided not to publish budget information for ICFP'20, but my > understanding is that the $100 registration scheme generated a strong > profit for the conference, to the point that, if the costs are comparable > to last year, last year profit would suffice to fund ICFP'21 entirely. Why > would we have a $100 registration fee again? > > ICFP is a flagship conference at the intersection of theoretical works and > practical functional programming, and it could attract a vibrant crowd of > people outside academia (in particular: not students), who may not have an > easy path to reimbursement -- this is especially important for the > workshops. > > (Disclaimer: I'm criticising past registration fees and prospective > registration fees, but not of course the people doing the hard work of > organizing the conference! They have all my gratitude.) > > On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 4:05 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.sche...@gmail.com > > > wrote: > > > Dear types-list, > > > > Going on a tangent from Flavien's earlier post: I really think that > online > > conferences should be free. > > > > Several conferences (PLDI for example) managed to run free-of-charge > since > > the pandemic started, and they reported broader attendance and a strong > > diversity of attendants, which sounds great. I don't think we can achieve > > this with for-pay online conferences. > > > > ICFP is coming up shortly with a $100 registration price tag, and I did > > not register. > > > > I'm aware that running a large virtual conference requires computing > > resources that do have a cost. For PLDI for example, the report only says > > that the cost was covered by industrial sponsors. Are numbers publicly > > available on the cost of running a virtual conference? Note that if we > > managed to run a conference on free software, I'm sure that institutions > > and volunteers could be convinced to help hosting and monitoring the > > conference services during the event. > > >