CHI Conference Finances and Format Part One: Prior and Current Context

Purpose of this blog post: This blog will explain the context of CHI’s finances and format, and how these have not evolved since 2008, while the world (and our HCI community) has significantly changed in that same time frame. In Part Two, we propose actionable plans to change the CHI conference, so that it can sustain itself both financially and in terms of its format.

TL;DR:

• CHI has reached the end of its ability to make cuts in spending with its current format. It needs to raise revenue and change its format dramatically to balance a budget.
• The CHI papers program has grown beyond what we can support in the time and space that we have for CHI, and has left little room for discussion and connection.
• The experience of the conference and the financial sustainability of the conference are intertwined.
• The CHI SC has considered and proposed several models of changing the CHI format, using insights gathered as part of the CHI 2030 visioning exercise, and several working groups addressing the format and finances of CHI. These ideas are presented in Part Two: Shaping the Future of CHI

Prior Context: Finances and Format

Finances from 2008

CHI registration fees have not increased since 2008. In this same time frame, inflation has risen—for example, by approximately 43% in the USA. Also in this same time frame, the financial support provided by the CHI conference to address inequities and improve access have risen (e.g., childcare, subsidized registration to economically developing countries, accessibility accommodations). Additionally, hybrid presentation — which comes with significant costs — has been both necessary due to pandemic and desired to increase equity. This combination of increasing expenses, without an accompanying increase in income through registrations, has resulted in a continuous squeezing of CHI General Chairs (GC) to reduce the controllable parts of their budgets through cuts. Each year, CHI GCs have done more, with less.

Since the CHI Steering Committee (SC) has been in place (2016), we have reduced expenses through the removal of the printed proceedings, the digital proceedings (USB), the printed conference program, conference bags, and advertising outside our venue. As many of these changes were actually initiated through sustainability arguments, and replaced by access to services (e.g., SIGCHI Progressive Web App for the conference program), we were able to remove them without affecting the conference experience in a significant way. We also reduced costs through the gradual removal of the physical CHI Program Committee (PC) Meeting, which was held for the last time in December 2018. As we moved to virtual PC meetings, we saw significant savings and reduced impact on climate, but also have identified potential quality challenges in our reviewing process introduced by meeting virtually that need to be addressed. We then removed all publication production support (e.g., Sheridan), moving this effort to authors and volunteers. Further cuts to the conference experience include removing the Wednesday evening reception, the newcomer reception, expenses associated with keynote speakers, graphics design costs (moving this effort to volunteers), committee recognition gifts, printed conference program at a glance, and significantly reduced course instructor honoraria. Conferences also give an overhead to the ACM on behalf of the SIG: for CHI 23, this figure was calculated as 15% of its expenses.

For 2022, we offered a hybrid conference experience that included both the physical event and the virtual one. Running each of these formats carried expenses that were similar in scale. For example, the hybrid conference platform was similar in price to a physical convention centre rental; the logistics support for the virtual conference was double that for the physical conference; the AV* support for the hybrid conference more than double the cost of a physical-only conference. For 2023, we offered a mixed hybrid conference experience that eliminated the online platform, instead using the SIGCHI Progressive Web App and YouTube, with support from Discord and Zoom for asynchronous experience of most conference tracks. This decision reduced some of the accompanying AV costs, although the costs to support some synchronous hybrid experience (e.g., keynotes and workshops) were still quite high. This compromise was reported by online participants in the post-conference survey to be less engaging. CHI 2024 has written about their intentions to support hybrid engagement at a low cost: https://chi2024.acm.org/2023/11/09/hybrid-experience-at-chi-2024/,

Still, since 2016, it has been increasingly difficult to balance the CHI budget, and General Chairs and the Steering Committee have been asking the SIGCHI EC for permission to raise the registration fees. However, given the financial wellbeing of the SIG itself (note that SIGCHI and CHI operate with different budgets), the SIGCHI EC has been able to instead underwrite the CHI conference in various ways, preventing a registration rate increase that would increase the financial cost for attendees. For example, the SIGCHI Executive Committee (EC) has covered all but $150,000 of the venue rental expenses (which in 2023 exceeded $1,000,000), and has covered accessibility costs exceeding $25,000 (in 2023, accessibility requests cost $83,000). The position of the SIGCHI EC over the years was that until CHI took a financial loss, we should not increase fees. We expected that loss to occur sometime in 2018 or 2019 but an unexpected increase in onsite attendee registrations both of these years avoided a loss. The same was expected for 2020 or 2021, but COVID changed everything as the 2020 conference was canceled and 2021 took place virtually (CHI 2020 lost money, whereas CHI 2021 made a large surplus; however, both of these balances were related to the conference venues agreeing to rebook the rental contracts in future years. Otherwise, the conferences would have lost millions in each year). Finally, in 2022, CHI experienced a loss of $484,886, largely due to increased costs related to a fully hybrid conference experience alongside the lower cost of online attendance. Once their closing budget is finalized, CHI 23 will experience a much larger (and expected) loss, even though it was the largest in-person CHI to date, it responsibly covered the 19% VAT (required every time CHI is held in Europe) through registration, and the chairs secured both corporate sponsorship and a national grant. The cost of convention centres in Europe typically exceeds $1million for rental of the space alone, which makes it impossible to break even with our current pricing and format, and places a significant burden on all volunteers to balance a budget.

The figure shows how costs that we cannot control (e.g., logistics, management, registration, financial) are rising, and we are balancing the budget by reducing experiences (e.g., food and beverage costs** per person), and shifting the burden of organization to our community volunteers (e.g., organizing committee, proceedings production).

Format from 2008

In this same time frame, the format of CHI has not changed substantially; however, its growth and unique space demands for plenary, parallel tracks, interactivity etc. means an increasingly limited number of conference venues that are able to fit CHI in its current format (see the CHI SC blog post on site selection for more details). The four days of conference program, which is made up of paper talks, special interest groups (SIGs), panels, and keynotes, with the two days prior for workshops, symposia and the doctoral consortium is relatively unchanged over the years. The exhibit hall has hosted exhibitor booths, poster sessions, coffee breaks, receptions, and interactivity. There are a few tracks that have come (e.g., alt.chi) and gone (e.g., art track) and changes have been made within tracks (e.g., interactivity during opening reception or during coffee breaks); however, the general format of CHI has not seen drastic changes in decades. What has changed, however, is the scale. Throughout the 90s, fewer than 400 papers were submitted to CHI, and a general 25% acceptance rate meant that fewer than 100 papers were presented. In 2008, paper submissions had not yet crossed 1000 (714 papers and 341 notes) — 157 papers and 61 notes were presented in hand-curated sessions. Since 2008, paper submissions have grown year over year, with CHI 24 seeing 4046 paper and short paper submissions. If CHI 24 has a 25% accept rate, there will be more papers accepted to CHI 24 than were submitted to CHI 08. Every few years, we add an additional parallel ‘track’ of papers to accommodate this growth, further dividing the audience, who are not growing at the same rate. To prevent adding an additional track every other year, we have also seen continued shortening of CHI paper presentations — from 30-minute slots to under 10, with no time for discussion of meaningful Q&A.

Current Situation: Finances and Format

Current Finances

For the physical conference, fees have been the same since 2008 (http://www.chi2008.org/registration.html; see CHI 2018 as a comparison point https://chi2018.acm.org/attending/conference-fees/ ) and are graduated by timing (early, standard, late) and by role (ACM membership, student, emeritus). We have further added a reduction in fees for attendees from economically developing countries (as defined by the ACM) similar to the online rates for CHI 2021: 80% rate for category H and 25% rate for category I. Considering historical attendance from these countries at past CHI conferences, this decision has not meaningfully affected the budget. However, virtual conference fees can make a very large difference in the budget of the conference. In 2022, the conference had about 2000 in-person attendees and 2000 remote attendees. Remote registration was held to the very low 2021 price structure, even though in 2021 they did not have the $500k in expenses related to AV needs 2022 had to support. The low registration fee for virtual attendees in 2022 in no way covered the expense of their inclusion, and was subsidized by the in-person conference fees. In 2023, there were fewer remote attendees and more in-person attendees. Both 2022 and 2023 experienced large — and expected — financial losses, given that registration rates were not raised but expenses continue to rise. The CHI SC and the SIGCHI EC agree that we need to make changes so that the CHI conference can operate with a balanced budget.

Current Format

Beyond the financial considerations, we cannot continue to scale the growth in the CHI conference papers track by simply adding an additional room every few years. The CHI 24 papers submission blog post (https://chi2024.acm.org/2023/10/16/papers-track-post-submission-report/) does a great job of highlighting how submissions continue to increase, and how continuing to present all of the accepted papers in increasingly parallelized tracks (as we have done in the past) may not be a viable option moving forward. Posters are only present at coffee breaks. The conference days are quite long. Other than SIGs and workshops (which are highly parallelized themselves), there is no time built into the CHI program for structured networking and community building. CHI 2023 had more than 20 parallel content sessions at any given time. Official conference programming started as early as 7am and continued for 12 or more hours, with hosted social events continuing into the late evening.

We address the SC’s ideas for the future of CHI’s format and finances in Part Two of this post.

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*As with food costs (see below), these are more than you can imagine. Wifi access will cost between $80,000 and $250,000. Audiovisual between $250,000 and $1,000,000 depending on the level of hybridity being offered.
**The Food and Beverage costs seem like a lot of money, and everyone who has attended CHI knows that the food, while appreciated, is not *that* extraordinary. But what is not known to most attendees is that the cost of food at event centres is not what the cost of food is at stores, or even hotels. Prices vary dramatically by location, but cookies for coffee break cost $50–70 USD/dozen, a can of pop $7–10 each, $75–200 for a gallon of coffee, and it costs about $100–200 each time we fill up a water cooler. A box lunch with a sad sandwich, apple, cookie, and bottle of water will cost $40–75 USD. A self-serve buffet lunch will greatly exceed that for even the cheapest option. And venues do not allow you to bring in your own food; there is no option for restaurant delivery at a convention centre. This is true for convention centers all around the world. CHI used to provide food; now it — at best — provides snacks.