by Alex Potanin on Jul 20, 2026 | Tags: ACM, conference budgets, conference organization, programming languages, registration fees, SIGPLAN, student travel grants, transparency
SIGPLAN runs on a simple arithmetic: around $2M USD a year in conference registration income from POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and SPLASH/OOPSLA must cover the conferences themselves, some $300K in annual community support (PLMW, PAC travel funding, summer schools, and awards), and new student presenter travel grants — all while keeping the reserve ACM requires. In this post, the SIGPLAN Treasurer explains where the money comes from, why conferences ran at a loss for five years after COVID, how the new $300-per-day registration target was set, and what it all means for the PL community.
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by Alex Potanin on Aug 25, 2022 | Tags: climate change, conferences, diversity, hybrid
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many conferences were held online starting in late March 2020, and several of us helped with the fully virtual offering of SPLASH 2020. By mid-2021, however, vaccination was widespread and effective at preventing COVID infection and severe disease, and it became feasible to consider in-person attendance at conferences. Polls of authors and the larger community indicated strong interest in holding an in-person version of SPLASH. Still, as of October 2021 the US had not relaxed its travel restrictions on people from large parts of the world, and even beyond that some people would not be able to travel to SPLASH. We therefore decided to offer SPLASH as a Hybrid conference in October 2021, offering both in-person and virtual attendance options. We were also excited about piloting a hybrid conference, because there are many longer-term benefits if we can run them well, including supporting both in-person networking and accessibility for attendees who can only attend remotely. We knew doing so would be hard, but we also hoped to learn valuable lessons. SPLASH 2021 turned out to be an interesting case study as the first major post-COVID PL conference to go hybrid, and one of the earliest across the ACM as well.
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