In-person meetings are hugely beneficial for academic research; they provide a venue to collaborate and connect, making our community more connected and facilitating the exchange of ideas. In addition to SIGPLAN’s four annual flagship conferences, smaller local events increasingly facilitate face-to-face interactions in our community. In this post, we’ll discuss the value of local PL conferences and try to convince you (yes, you!) to attend such conferences—and maybe even organize one for your corner of the PL world.

The Benefits of Local Conferences

While international conferences are critical for building a cohesive global PL community, they also pose accessibility challenges, and their high organizing cost means that they can only happen a handful of times each year. Local conferences are a compelling alternative that target a particular country or region, rather than the entire global PL community. The authors of this post have helped to run the New Jersey Programming Languages and Systems Symposium (NJPLS) over the past few years, and in that time we have seen how local conferences address some of the biggest challenges posed by international ones.

Local conferences are more physically and economically accessible. By the nature of geography, local conferences do not require significant travel, making them easy to attend for people with families, people whose travel is restricted because of visa / immigration status, and anyone else who finds travel difficult. Reduced travel and registration costs also mean that local conferences are more accessible for researchers who do not have a significant amount of funding. Thanks to sponsors, NJPLS and many other local conferences are free for attendees.

Local conferences are more environmentally friendly. Again, by construction, people will travel shorter distances to local conferences. This means that the carbon cost of local conferences is much lower — even per-attendee — than major international conferences. Through the Climate Committee, SIGPLAN has been committed to reducing our community’s impact on the environment, and increasing local conferences supports that goal.

Local conferences can be more frequent. Unlike major conferences, which have dozens of organizers, local conferences are generally organized by a few students with support from a faculty member. Because they are lightweight to organize, they can run multiple times a year without becoming a burden. Sponsorship is also manageable—NJPLS generally has just one sponsor each time it runs, which is more than sufficient to pay for space and food. This lightweight, high-frequency model means that local conferences give researchers more opportunities throughout the year to connect with their colleagues in person.

Local conferences help build welcoming communities. We have worked hard to make NJPLS an open and welcoming community that is less intimidating for first-time conference attendees than a larger conference. This means that local conferences like NJPLS are a great place for students to give their first talk. Local conferences can be a fun and rewarding experience for both attendees and organizers, and expose attendees to new ideas.. When hosted at an academic institution, local undergraduates can attend and get excited about new research in PL!

It’s Your Turn!

So we’ve convinced you that you want a local PL conference in your region—great! Now we can tell you a little bit about what these conferences look like and how you can run one yourself.

What am I signing up for?

Local conferences generally last a single day and consist of contributed talks, mostly from students. The talks vary in topic and scope. They can include (but are not limited to):

• research talks on work-in-progress;
• non-research talks that are of general interest to PL researchers;
• practice talks for larger conferences (especially from students who have not given many talks before).

The talks are often a bit less formal than a major conference talk but more formal than a reading group chalk-talk. As with larger conferences, local conferences also include coffee breaks and lunches that give attendees a chance to catch up, discuss the talks, plan collaborations, etc.

How do I get started?

As mentioned above, we have all been recent organizers of NJPLS. As part of that process, we have been maintaining reusable materials that serve as a starting point for new organizers. These include:

• a manual that points out important details for organizing;
• a website template;
• templates for name tags, flyers, etc.; and
• registration forms.

These materials give new NJPLS organizers a solid base to build on, since many of the tedious details are already sorted out.

After putting the NJPLS materials through their paces for a few years, we think it is time to share them more broadly. The materials have already been used beyond NJPLS—they are currently being used to help kickstart the Upstate PL conference in Upstate New York—but until recently they were not officially publicly available. However, we are now happy to announce that we have released the NJPLS materials publicly as the Local PL Conference Materials on GitHub, which anyone is free to use and contribute to.

What’ll it cost, and who pays?

NJPLS typically offers a light breakfast, a buffet or boxed lunch, and one or two coffee breaks; attendees break off into their own groups for dinner. Depending on catering prices, this is usually in the ballpark of $50 per attendee (as of 2025), although it can be less expensive in some cases. Depending on where the meeting is held (good options include university lecture halls and local companies with event spaces), there may be a fee to rent a large enough room with appropriate A/V equipment.

Local conferences work best (and are easiest to organize) when they’re free. So who foots the bill? Historically, the organizers have paid, using some form of unrestricted funds (startup, returned overhead). More recently, corporate sponsors like Jane Street, Amazon, and Bloomberg have contributed to make these events possible.

—

Local PL conferences provide some of the benefits of in-person meetings, while being more accessible to junior and disadvantaged researchers. Following the success of NJPLS—and additional local PL conferences in New England, the Midwest, and Upstate New York—we hope that you will consider starting your own local PL conferences, wherever your PL research takes place. Using our materials will bootstrap the organization of your own conference, alleviating some of the organization burden (please contribute notes about your experiences to the GitHub repo). A broad network of PL meetups will allow people who are interested in PL, but who do not have the time or resources to attend a major conference, to connect in-person with our amazing community. If you have any questions about organizing your own local seminar, send us an email—we’d love to help.

 

 

Bios

Harry Goldstein is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He works at the intersection of programming languages, software engineering, and human-computer interaction to build systems that help software developers write better, safer software. Harry organized NJPLS in 2023 as a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Greenberg is an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He works on a variety of topics in programming languages and systems: refinement types and gradual typing; formal proof; logic programming; the shell and its ecosystem. Michael has helped organize SoCalPLS while at Pomona College. He restarted NJPLS in 2022 after a five-year hiatus. He has been attending regional PL workshops since 2004.

Noam Zilberstein is a PhD candidate at Cornell University and former Staff Software Engineer at Facebook. His research focuses on formal methods for programs that branch into multiple outcomes due to computational effects such as nondeterminism, randomization, concurrency, and combinations thereof. Noam organized NJPLS at Cornell Tech in 2024 and has also organized the TPSA and Incorrectness workshops at POPL 2024-2026.

Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the SIGPLAN blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGPLAN or its parent organization, ACM.