Re: Paying to present

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 8:55 -0800 3/6/04, John Denker wrote:
> But make sure you can deliver the facilities you promise.  You
> may find that arranging all the necessary details is rather
> labor-intensive.  So you will need a budget and/or a goodly number
> of worker bees.  And you might want to partner with somebody who's
> done it before, since there are a lot of ways to make mistakes.

Hear, hear. Organizing a conference is a very labor-intensive
activity. I  have organized two (very) small conferences, each with
fewer than 100 participants, and I found that keeping track of all
the details (registration, arranging for rooms, arranging for nearby
lodging, making sure the facilities in all the rooms are adequate,
scheduling, collecting papers, arranging for invited speakers,
catering food, finding secure space for exhibitors, etc., etc.--the
list is long) took a whole lot of my time, and a whole lot of
assistance.

The relationship between the effort required to organize a conference
and the size of that conference is not linear. Despite the most
meticulous preparations, things can go wrong at the last minute, and
the immediate efforts of any number of people to fix the problem are
needed. Add to that the requirement that a large conference needs to
have arrangements started a couple of years in advance (hotels fill
up and a big conference needs lots of rooms, both for people and for
sessions.

Furthermore, more and more universities have discovered that their
facilities can be a cash cow during times when they are otherwise
unused, so the option of holding a conference on the campus of a
university and thus doing is on the cheap is not nearly so attractive
as it was, say, ten years ago. In fact, it has become such that in at
least some cases, the cost of the university facilities is large
enough that local hotels can even be cheaper, or at least competitive.

Putting on a conference is not cheap, and the costs have to come from
somewhere. I'm told by the conference staff at AAPT that the two
major conferences that they sponsor every year are subsidized by the
dues of the majority of members who do not attend--that is, the
receipts from registration fees and other conference-related income
does not cover the cost of the conference. Even so, the cost of
attending those conferences is not trivial.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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