Authors: Caroline Appert, Simone Barbosa, Regan Mandryk

In Conference Finances and Format—Part One: Prior and Current Context, we described the financial and format constraints of CHI. Given those constraints, it is the CHI Steering Committee’s (SC) responsibility to evolve the CHI conference to offer a model that is both financially self-sustaining that allows for a better attendee experience with time for structured discussion and conferring.

In Part Two: Shaping the Future of CHI, we explored ways to address those constraints. In order to open the discussion with the community and assess the changes that the community is willing to make, we asked the community to comment on those proposals through both a survey and two Zoom sessions on shaping the future of CHI.

This blog post reports on the observations that we made.

Over the two Zoom sessions, there were approximately 50 participants, primarily attending from North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia. In the sessions members of the CHI SC gave a presentation of the history and current situation regarding the format and finances of CHI, and then described a series of proposed changes, asking for community feedback after each proposal. Finally, a time was allocated for asking for new ideas on addressing the challenges facing the CHI conference series. 

Overall, 323 persons took part in the survey. When interpreting the results reported below, it is important to keep in mind that this sample is relatively small in comparison with the community size (4,722 attendees for CHI ‘23). The geographic distribution of respondents and their CHI experience are reported in the two charts below. As 17 respondents stated not having yet attended a CHI conference, they were excluded from the subsequent analysis.

The survey consisted of a series of proposals, each aligning with one the following three objectives: 1) increase participants’ time for conferring, 2) reduce the conference expenses or 3) increase the conference revenue. Survey participants were requested to express their level of support for each proposal by assigning a score between 0 (No support) and 10 (Full support). Respondents were also systematically invited to share open comments. In all charts below, the median (M) is used as a central measure of respondents’ scores.

1. Increase the time for conferring

1a. By changing the presentation format

Proposal: All papers give lightning talks, followed by parallelized discussion time in a ‘scrum’ format.

As illustrated above, respondents’ scores to this proposal were quite uniformly distributed over the full [0-10] range. In their open comments, respondents feared that the talks might become too short, resulting in a format that might be stressful for non-native English speakers who might need more time to convey important messages and some difficulties for attendees to absorb enough substantial content. Also note that we did not suggest a specific duration for the lightning talks, so participants’ assumptions about that may have increased the variability of their responses. In the Zoom sessions, participants were supportive of this proposal, but echoed concerns about the different type of ‘performance’ required in a short well-produced lightning talk.

1b. By increasing the parallelization of the talks.

Proposal: We increase parallelization of the talks.

With a median of 4 and a distribution skewed towards more negative reactions than positive ones, we can infer that CHI has reached a level of parallelization that should not continue to increase. The detailed proposal suggested doubling the number of parallel sessions, which stirred some apprehension among respondents who deemed such an increase as unsustainable. Despite this, some respondents explicitly expressed a preference for this option over one where not all authors would have sufficient time to present at the conference. In the Zoom session, some participants noted that they had attended large conferences with highly parallel small paper sessions, and that the experience was not enjoyable for the presenters.

1c. By decreasing the number of presentations

The survey made a series of proposals that would decrease the number of presentations at the conference:

Proposal: We present only the top 5%–10% of papers as talks. 

The other 90%-95% of the papers would be available to attendees either 1) as pre-recorded videos only or 2) as pre-recorded videos + posters.

Presenting the large majority of papers as videos only (Left) was very unpopular, with respondents being concerned about the almost zero value for authors to attend the conference. The possibility of complementing the video by a poster (Right) was slightly better perceived but raised concerns regarding the additional work it represents for authors for a limited exposure at the conference. But, most importantly, these two proposals caused negative reactions due to concerns related to the selection process of these “top papers” and the elitist atmosphere it would create at the conference. In the Zoom sessions, participants were also concerned about selection mechanisms for what would be considered as the “top papers”.

Proposal: We could accept only the top 5%–10% of papers as talks.

This even more radical proposal that would consist in drastically decreasing the acceptance rate was strongly rejected. Respondents argued that adopting an exceedingly low acceptance rate would introduce a considerable degree of randomness and inequities into the selection process. Respondents estimate that the selection would be decorrelated from the scientific quality of papers and would inherently reduce the diversity in papers accepted at CHI. Participants in the Zoom sessions were concerned about the effects on career development for more junior academics.

Proposal: We could limit the presentations by limiting the number of submissions per author or by instituting a submission fee.

Although limiting the number of submissions per author (Left) was assessed slightly positively per respondents, the comments highlighted the risk of such a proposal to be unfair and potentially toxic for students in large groups and the difficulty of defining a criterion to define the limit. Instituting a submission fee (Right) was largely rejected by respondents mostly because of the equity concerns it would generate between well-funded groups and less well-funded groups.

2. Reducing expenses

2a. By removing exhibitors

Proposal: Remove the exhibitors

While a few respondents acknowledged that exhibitor booths might facilitate connections for young researchers with companies, a majority of respondents’ comments pointed at the limitations of an exhibit hall as an effective platform for companies to recruit researchers. The concerns raised also included the predominantly US-centric representation of companies and the perception that corporate interests often do not align with advancing scientific knowledge, which should remain the driving force of CHI. Participants in the Zoom sessions noted that exhibitor booths are not the only means of engaging with companies at CHI.

2b. By removing or reducing interactivity

Proposal: Remove or Reduce Interactivity

In general, respondents perceive Interactivity as a fundamental aspect of CHI, considering it an indispensable platform for engaging with cutting-edge technologies. Consequently, there was a tendency to dismiss the idea of eliminating the Interactivity venue altogether (Left). Instead, respondents leaned towards the proposal to scale down Interactivity (Right), advocating for a refinement of the curation process. Some respondents also suggested potentially showcasing fewer works through several sessions in smaller rooms. Participants in the Zoom sessions agreed.

2c. By reducing our geographical diversity

Proposal: Move to a new format in which either: 1) we meet physically every 2 years and virtually in between or 2) we rotate CHI around 2-4 known locations.

Respondents acknowledged the positive aspect of reducing our carbon footprint by having virtual CHI conferences every two years (Left). However, they also expressed concerns regarding the potential impact on students’ careers. Virtual conferences, compared to physical ones, were perceived as less efficient for students to present their work and engage with an international audience. This would be particularly detrimental to students in countries where PhD programs are limited to 3 years. The shift to a virtual format every two years could mean that such students would have only a single opportunity for such valuable exposure during their PhD. Regarding the proposal to rotate CHI around 2-4 established locations (Right), respondents’ scores were quite uniformly distributed and rather neutral on average. While it could be more practical if the locations are strategically chosen to facilitate access and create as less friction as possible (regarding e.g., visa concerns), it would privilege the same regions repeatedly. Numerous respondents advocated for a more dynamic approach, emphasizing the importance of regularly exploring new locations and periodically reassessing and diversifying venues over the long term. In the Zoom sessions, participants raised the possibility of regional meetups for people who live in areas in which there is more possibility for idea exchange in HCI, but also noted that many CHI attendees live and work in areas in which geography or lack of density in HCI researchers make this challenging. They further noted that it would reduce their opportunities to meet internationally with colleagues in their specific subdomain of HCI.

3. Increasing revenue

3a. By charging a submission fee or presentation fee

Proposal: Charge a submission fee and/or a presentation fee.

These two proposals were largely rejected by respondents, with a lot of comments raising the risk of increasing inequities. Respondents also mentioned that, if implemented, stringent criteria should be meticulously crafted to grant waivers to less privileged groups. This precautionary measure aims to address the potential difficulties these fees might pose for less privileged groups to access the conference.

3b. By securing more industry sponsors

Proposal: Secure more industry sponsors.

Although this proposal was scored quite positively by respondents as it would be more money without a high impact on our current conference model, a lot of respondents adopted a cautionary tone in their comments. Participants expressed concerns about the ethical implications of a strong reliance on funding from the industry. Some emphasized the potential unreliability of this funding source, which depends on economic fluctuations. Additionally, there were comments about the high pressure it could place on CHI organizers to secure sufficient and reliable sponsorships. In the Zoom sessions, participants representing industry noted that the landscape of sponsorship was changing in the tech industry and that shrinking budgets meant less opportunity for sponsoring academic events. Further, they noted that sponsorship often came from budgets devoted to recruiting activities, which had been frozen in an era of increasing layoffs. 

3c. By stopping subsidizing student registrations

Proposal: Stop subsidizing student registrations.

The distribution of respondents’ scores is negatively skewed, reflecting a consensus on the significance of facilitating student access to the conference. Some respondents mention though that a lower level of subsidization may likely not be an obstacle for students’ access overall. In the Zoom sessions, there was a lively conversation on the inequity of subsidizing discounted registrations for students from well-funded institutions by the full-price registrations of non-students from less-well-funded institutions. Furthermore, participants noted that there was too big of an incentive to cheat the system when there are large student discounts. 

3d. By cutting the student volunteer (SV) program

Proposal: Cut the student volunteer program.

Respondents’ scores exhibit a balanced distribution regarding this proposal. Comments revealed that it is not clear for all that the cost of the SV program has such a significant share in the conference budget. However, as noted by many respondents, it is not clear how much could be saved by cutting the SV program altogether. SVs undertake tasks that would otherwise require contracting a vendor. Some respondents propose exploring alternatives, such as having SVs contribute a small registration fee, to reduce costs without eliminating the program. Furthermore, concerns were raised about the perceived inequality in accessibility to the SV program, with the current lottery-based selection process seen as a potential barrier for some students. In the Zoom session, participants echoed these benefits, drawbacks, and inequities of the current SV program.

Summary

We would like to thank all the respondents who took the time to provide valuable feedback, and all attendees of the two Zoom sessions who contributed thoughts. We have carefully read and analyzed all the detailed comments. All this feedback will help the Steering Committee propose a new model of CHI to the community, for further discussion and implementation as soon as 2026. Stay tuned for our suggested redesign in Part Four.

Author: Regan L. Mandryk

Purpose of this blog post: In this post, we describe the future of CHI—both in terms of models for a financially self-sustaining CHI and models for a format that will allow for a better attendee experience with time for structured discussion and conferring. 

In Conference Finances and Format—Part One: Prior and Current Context, we described the financial and format constraints of CHI. Please read it for details, but the takeaway message is that CHI has grown in full paper submissions much faster than in attendees. Further, no major changes have been made to the format or fee structure in a time in which paper submissions have more than quadrupled and the interest rate has risen by 43% in the USA. Each year, we make small changes by adding additional parallel tracks, reducing the length of talks, and squeezing more out of our budgets in the face of increasing expenses and stagnant revenues. Because the finances and format of CHI are intertwined, we consider these issues together. 

The CHI Steering Committee (SC) has formed several working groups to consider how to address the scale, format, and finances of CHI. We have presented the situation regularly to the SIGCHI Executive Committee and have worked closely with the ACM to consider options moving forward. 

Future Finances

Continuing to make budget cuts is not a viable plan for the future of the CHI conference.  We have to raise revenue and decrease expenses by changing the conference format to make CHI financially self-sustaining in the future. There are some format and budget changes that we do not support (e.g., removing accessibility supports, choosing a singular inexpensive location in the USA); however, here we list some of the format changes that we could combine with a small registration hike to create a balanced budget: 

We could remove the exhibitors. While this would change the face of CHI, it would also allow us to keep growing without increasing registration fees, because we would remove the exhibit hall, opening up more large hotels as site options, which can be cheaper than convention centres, and would avoid significant costs associated with exhibitor booth construction and access. However, many students and first-time attendees really value the exhibitors and attend primarily to meet potential employers from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta. The exhibit has provided CHI with a ‘wow factor’ that differentiates it from other academic conferences. 

We could remove or reduce interactivity. Many CHI attendees state that this is their favourite part of CHI (on the post-conference surveys) and a big differentiator of CHI from other conferences. However, the program is very expensive to run in its present form. Expenses like drayage (paying people to carry boxes), shipping, electrical drops, lighting, and tables add up to a significant expense for the conference and most attendees do not even understand that CHI must pay for these fundamental supports to the interactivity showcase. Removing the track or reducing the track to a smaller form would eliminate these expenses; however, would fundamentally change what has been an integral aspect of CHI for a very long time. 

We could charge a submission fee or presentation fee. This would allow us to separate out the costs of presentation and publication, while also keeping fees low. However this may privilege people from the global north or well-funded institutions.

We could move to a new format in which we met physically every other year as an international community and virtually in between. This would reduce the venue costs and allow us to earn revenue every other year, as entirely virtual conferences are significantly lower in expenses. However, it may have an impact on important networking opportunities for early career researchers and PhD students, who may only have the option to present physically at a single CHI conference during their degree. Hosting a virtual CHI by choice may also affect our ability to recruit willing volunteers into major organizational roles. Although some community members could organize regional events, this is not possible in less populated areas without a large HCI community and would privilege people in HCI-dense areas. 

We could stop subsidizing student registrations. Currently, student registrations are subsidized by non-student registrations and set at no more than half the cost of a full registration, yet providing all of the conference supports to students is the same cost as for non-students. There is no rule that prevents us from changing this model. However, this may impact the ability of students to attend and grow their HCI networks, particularly if they are not from well-funded institutions or research groups.

We could cut the student volunteer program. The student volunteer program is as expensive for the conference as holding interactivity—we spend a significant amount of money (well over $200,000 per year) to keep the SV program going. However, the program provides students with valuable experience in community service and networking, and allows many to attend with reduced costs. Anecdotally, most of our conference leadership was at one point in the student volunteer program. On the other hand, the vast majority of student attendees cannot access the benefits of the SV program (due to the lottery system), so spreading the benefits more broadly around our student attendees may have more community benefits. 

We could rotate CHI around 2-4 known locations. This would save the conference logistic costs and may allow us to negotiate better prices in longer-term contracts. However the choice of these locations would probably reflect past structural biases to the global north and we lose the opportunity to move the conference to new places to aid access for different parts of our community across the world. 

We could expend more effort on securing industry sponsors. Some conferences gain revenue through sponsorship from major companies. CHI’s sponsorship revenue has traditionally been very small. However, increasing industry sponsorship would yield space on the exhibit floor and time in the program to sponsors in return. Further, in the post-conference survey, members of our community have expressed concerns with vetting the ethical practices of companies who wish to sponsor CHI, creating additional labour for our volunteers who coordinate sponsorships.

There are many options for the future of the CHI conference to host a valuable and meaningful event without increasing costs, but it will require new ways of thinking about why we confer and what we expect from our annual meeting. The Steering Committee is actively considering all these options in collaboration with past, present, and future CHI organizing committees. In January 2023, the CHI SC had a design session to generate a short list of possible versions of CHI that are financially self-sustaining.

The question for the community is: what aspect of CHI are you willing to change to see CHI become financially self-sustaining? 

Future Format

Beyond the financial issues, the format of CHI keeps scaling to accommodate our growth, without any major redesigns. When we have too many papers, we simply add another parallel papers track (current modeling suggests this needs to happen every other year). When we have too many posters, we contract larger exhibit halls, further limiting our site selection options. This has resulted in a bloated, intense program in which attendees struggle to plan a daily schedule that allows them to see what they wish to see (according to the feedback on our post-conference surveys). Further, there is little structured networking time or time for discussion of content or ideas: we have lost the ‘confer’ part of our conference. 

Based on the CHI 2030 visioning exercise, the CHI SC formed a working group in 2021 to address the scale and format of CHI. We came up with the following guiding principles for a re-imagining of the CHI conference program: 

1. CHI provides a range of opportunities to participate and engage around content and ideas

• There are diverse ways to attend and engage in meaningful ways (i.e., range of content maturity) 
• There are many ways to fund the ticket for attending CHI (i.e., not just through full papers)
• There are ways of engaging people at all stages (i.e., students through senior leaders) and from multiple perspectives (e.g., practitioners, researchers, teachers)

2. CHI provides structured mechanisms for connecting people

• The post-CHI surveys show that we continually fall short on focusing on structured mechanisms to provide networking and connection opportunities that are desired by attendees and this needs to change

3. Papers are the key element that needs to be addressed in a CHI re-design, as it’s such a huge number and one of the main constraints on venue space and program time

• Too many parallel talks
• Takes space away from other interactive engagement
• Too much content absorption and not enough time for discussion
• But papers have traditionally been the core of the CHI experience
• Our program is too large to ‘curate’ sessions; we need to rely on tools for session formation

We came up with several solutions to the scale of CHI, but all of them involved not presenting all of the papers as talks. Our favoured solution involved spending half of the day learning about the state of the art in HCI through paper presentations of peer reviewed content. In the other half of the day, we construct the future together through interactive content (e.g.,  workshops, SIGs, panels, roundtables, provocations, mentoring events, student competition venues, other discussion formats, and posters)—venues that would be juried or curated. This would have the benefits of increasing time available for conferring in structured formats and also increasing the time for discussion around each paper. However, we would necessarily decrease the time in the schedule devoted to paper talks. Examples of how we could reduce the number of talks include: 

We could have all papers give lightning talks, followed by parallelized discussion time in a ‘scrum’ format. If we reduced all talks to lightning presentations, each accepted paper would be able to present to a larger audience through less parallelization. Then, attendees could discuss the papers asynchronously with authors in parallelized discussion scrum, allowing for greater depth in discussion. However, this makes it harder for newcomers to engage with content and does require social interaction for content access. 

We could present only the top 5%–10% of papers as talks. The remaining full papers would be either presented asynchronously on YouTube or given a poster slot. However, we would need to come up with methods of determining which papers were presented as talks in an already overloaded review process. Further, we need to consider how we differentiate late-breaking work or work-in-progress posters from full paper posters. 

We could accept only the top 5%–10% of papers. Other large conferences have very low acceptance rates. However, this might decrease the number of people willing to attend CHI and could affect the review process in negative ways. 

We could increase parallelization of the talks. We currently have around 13 parallel tracks of paper talks at any given time. We could double this, essentially halving the audience of each paper session. However, this would make an already packed schedule even more challenging for attendees, and may make room booking impossible for technical program chairs. 

We could limit the number of submissions. To return to the submission and acceptance numbers of a more manageable era, we could simply limit the number of papers that an author can submit. However, this would cause issues in large research groups in which a professor advises a number of PhD students. We could also institute a submission fee, to help authors think carefully about their submissions; however, as noted above, this might privilege individuals from well-funded institutions and research groups. 

The question for the community is: what are you willing to change to increase the time available for discussion and conferring?

Continue the Conversation… 

We invite you to consider this historical context, current situation, and future formats by joining us at one of two sessions in which we will work together to shape the future of CHI. We will listen to your values and concerns, and hear your ideas for the future of our conference. We will ask the hard questions about what you are willing to trade off for the parts of CHI that are most important to you. We will take what we hear in these sessions and propose several future models of CHI to the community at large, for further discussion and implementation as soon as 2026. These decisions will be in line with the CHI SC’s Vision and Values Statement. 

Synchronous Sessions on Shaping the Future of CHI

You can join us at one (or both) of two zoom + miro sessions on shaping the future of CHI.

Session 1: Tuesday, December 5, 16:00 UTC
Vancouver: 08:00, New York: 11:00, Paris: 17:00, New Delhi: 21:30, Tokyo: Wed 01:00, Melbourne: Wed 03:00 (https://dateful.com/eventlink/3895171221)

Zoom link is being sent to SIGCHI members via email.

Session 2: Wednesday, Dec 6, 05:00 UTC
Vancouver: Tues 21:00, New York: Tues midnight, Paris: 06:00, New Delhi: 10:30, Tokyo: 14:00, Melbourne: 16:00 (https://dateful.com/eventlink/1334330769)

Zoom link is being sent to SIGCHI members via email.

Contribute Asynchronously on Shaping the Future of CHI

You can provide your degree of support and opinions on each of the proposals by completing our survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5XDGSCN.

Author: Regan L. Mandryk

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 ¹support 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 that exceed $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 person²), 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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1. 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. ↩︎
2. 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. ↩︎