Free CCC

Dieter van Melkebeek, the conference chair of the Computational Complexity Conference (CCC), has started a discussion on whether to end the IEEE “sponsorship” of CCC. This is, I realize, a supremely boring topic, which seemingly affects only the handful of people who are tasked with organizing the conference. It does, however, affect to some extent all who ever paid a registration fee or published a paper in CCC, and I would like to discuss why I am, in the strongest possible way, in favor of leaving IEEE.

First of all, the term “sponsoring” here is a bit misleading. IEEE sponsors CCC not in the way Coca Cola sponsors the Olympics, but more in the way pirates sponsor navigation, or Elsevier sponsors scholarly publications. That is, it’s not that IEEE subsidizes the conference in exchange for exposure and good will; IEEE takes a huge chunk of our registration money, in exchange for making the lives of the local organizers harder. (I don’t mean to single out IEEE, when a professional society sponsors a conference it always works this way, but IEEE is particularly skilled at making the lives of the organizers hard.)

Last year I was an organizer of the complexity conference at Stanford. We had 108 attendees, who paid a total of $37,425 of registrations, or $346.5 each on average. How did we spend this money?

IEEE charged a 20% overhead to all expenses; that’s about $60 per person and about $6,500 for the whole conference. This, I should emphasize, is for doing literally nothing, except creating problems. For example, our conference could not be “approved” until all the paperwork of the previous conference was closed; it wasn’t closed because they were expecting some banking documents from them and I don’t remember if the issue was that the document does not exist in Portugal, or that they had already received the document and they had lost it. We were not allowed to make the conference web site go live until this was resolved.

One of the perks of organizing the conference with IEEE is that they provide free banking in the United States. (If the conference were organized by a created-for-this-purpose non-profit, it could have its own permanent bank account for little or no fee.) Three weeks after we sent all the paperwork to have our IEEE bank account set up, we get an email from the person we paid $6,500 to “assist” us, saying “URGENT, URGENT, you have to send us the paperwork for the bank account”. After we reminded them that they had had it for three weeks, they replied, “oh yes, we do,” no apology. (And it still took a while to get the checks.)

The free banking does not include free registration handling, however. Here I accept responsibility for being foolish enough, after all this, to trust IEEE with their registration service. At a cost of more than $26 per person (that’s almost $3,000) they produced a registration website that seemed put together by a high school intern, and which required filling up five pages of… well, if you attended the conference you remember it.

Finally, IEEE press charged almost $2,000 (almost $18 per person) for the proceedings. Which proceedings, you may ask, since the conference had no proceedings? That’s a very good question. The charge of $1,925 was to take our papers, take the copyright, and then put the papers were it is impossible to find them, even if you subscribe to the IEEE digital library. (Seriously, try to google a paper appeared in an ACM conference and one appeared in an IEEE conference and see if you are able to get the IEEE paper. Say what you want about the ACM, at least they know how to build a web site.)

In summary, IEEE took $6,500 for doing nothing but causing delays, $3,000 for a terrible registration site, and $2,000 to hide our papers. That’s more than $100 per attendee, and about 30% of how we spent the registration fee. The rest went on food and room rent.

Why are we still doing this? One reason is that the only people that are really affected by this system are the local organizers, and once one is done with the job, one doesn’t want to hear of or talk about IEEE any more. The other reason is that there is a big initial effort that is needed to make the conference independent. One needs to start some kind of entity to own the conference (the IACR, for example, was founded pretty much for the purpose of running CRYPTO and the other crypto conferences), which needs to have a statute, officers, a bank account and all kind of paperwork needs to be done. After that, however, it’s smooth sailing and considerable savings.

Here is one thing that IEEE does: if the conference runs a deficit, they cover it. We did, in fact run a deficit last year, of about $1,000; so IEEE “covered” it, but that just means that instead of $6,500 for the “sponsorship” they got $5,500. If, going forward, we budget with the intention of putting away $5,000 to $7,000 per year, the registration costs will go down slightly and over a few years we can put away, say $20,000 that can be a cushion for any kind of unforeseen event, and from that point forward budget to a balanced budget, with notably lower registration fees, and with some years running a surplus and some years running a deficit. Plus, we own our papers, and people can find them!

Ok, this is as boring as could be expected. I thank all those that have read so far, and, for the sanity of future local organizers and the principle of keeping our hard-earned taxpayer money and our papers, please support making CCC an independent conference.

Link to CCC forum