How to Run a Conference

I go to quite a lot of scientific conferences - maybe 10-15 per year - and they all tend to be in posh hotels with entry restricted to those able to find the registration fee, which normally is hundreds of dollars, and which pays for renting the conference room at the posh hotel, speaker travel, exorbitant cookies etc.

Sometimes there are not many people there. I remember once flying all the way over from France to Seattle to give a talk to about 10 people.  But many more than that would have been interested - its just that they were blocked by the gnashing costs.  A very recent conference I was at had trouble attracting enough attendees, even though I know dozens of young local scientists would have liked to attend.

So here's what to do (for some of the conferences, at least):

(a) stop holding conferences in posh hotels - hold them in university lecture halls.
(b) stop providing free meals
(c) stop providing free coffee and cookies
(d) stop funding speaker travel
(e) reduce the registration costs as the conference approaches if there are not enough attendees
(f) let in all students free

Then conferences would be what they really should be: a  transmission of passion and knowledge to an enthusiastic and inspired young audience.

Nobody In Edinburgh?

[Old Bus on the Isle of Hoy, Scotland. Photo by Martin Bay].

Time to spruce up the old bangers, maybe? We're economizing on travel!

 I'll be giving a resounding  Plenary Lecture at the International Conference on Neutron Scattering in Edinburgh in July. However, it now appears that very few colleagues from the USA will be there to witness this edifying spectacle.  You see, we are now seeing the effect of The New Travel Restrictions. Indeed, the Energy Department Inspector General's report notes that in the last six years  over 90,000 contractor employee foreign travel trips occurred with a cost to the government of just over $300 million.  That's quite a lot of dough! 

Now, don't get me wrong, I am strongly in favor of reducing unnecessary government expenditure, but things need to be thought through, or unintended consequences shape the end result.  In the case of scientists, many lay-people don't realize that talking with other scientists about your work and learning about other scientists' work in person are absolutely critical to making key discoveries. If scientists don't go to foreign conferences then they don't get to talk with people from other countries  about projects, and, moreover, they don't get to publicize their work. So the result is less well-informed, less motivated scientists doing poor-quality work that no-one else in the world pays much attention to. This reduces significantly the value of funds invested in the research in the first place. To put it another way, we may well spend $3bn on the Spallation Neutron Source, but  if we then try to crimp a few thousand dollars by stopping people going to the world's premier neutron conference future work at SNS will be of lower quality and the worldwide standing of the USA in the neutron sciences will be significantly diminished. 

Here's an alternative suggestion. It seems to me that, unless my maths is really, really bad, the figures above equate to about $3300 per person per trip.  How about simply putting a cap on foreign travel of, say, $2800 per trip? People can get to most places for a $1500 airfare and $200 per day for the hotel and registration. They might have to work a bit online to bring costs down, but that's the point, isn't it?  Better still, if we were to allow lots of  our IT researchers to go to foreign conferences about high-performance computing then, sitting down over a few beers with their German, Chinese and Japanese counterparts, they might just figure out a way  to make videoconferencing really fast and high quality, thus obviating the need for any foreign conference travel at all.  And don't worry, for quite  a while alcohol has not been reimbursable!