I’ve grumbled about the ludicrous price of conferences a lot recently. To put this in perspective:
I am off to a Dagstuhl seminar soon. The total cost of attending this three-day event (train to the airport, flight, taxi to the venue in the middle of nowhere, food, accommodation, and attendance) is less than just the registration fee for SOSP last year and EuroLLVM this year. And I expect to get far more out of it than either.
Last year I taught at a week-long summer school (PLISS). If I had paid the registration fee, the total cost of attending would have been slightly more than the cost of registration for either of the other events.
But both of those events are bigger! Yes, but does that make them more useful? I don’t have time to talk to most of the attendees and so much of the program is full of talks that could have been prerecorded videos (which I could watch without travelling) that the actual face-to-face time with other people is smaller.
Computer science really needs to rethink the ‘spend huge amounts of money going to massive conferences’ model. It excludes people who aren’t backed by well-funded institutions. And the value for attendees is quite low (far lower than for a lot of more focused smaller events).