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How to GC
This page provides a step by step description of a "typical" CGO conference organization. It is organized in chronological order of the steps (M-xx = xx months before conference) because typically, the organization is spread over a long period time, and it is sometimes difficult to recall when to do what.
You first need to convince the Steering Committee to let you organize CGO in the proposed location. Start your bid at least 2 years in advance: typically go the CGO Business meeting at Y-2 to present your bid. Your bid should include:
- A description of your team: GC and/or PC, as many organizing committee members as possible;
- Description of location: why it is attractive, CGO academic/industry population in the vincinity, attractions, weather, etc;
- Description of the venue: capacity, hotel/conference center/other, facilities such as WiFi, video projects, screens, catering, etc; implicitly, at this stage, you should have a clear idea of your venue, including an invoice, even if you did not yet sign any contract, obviously;
- Hotel(s): cost per room, capacity;
- Accessibility/Transportation: close to major international airport, and how to get from airport to venue (cost and how easy it is);
- Possible excursions at the location: attractiveness, cost;
- Provide an estimated budget: venue, catering, excursion, transportation, proceedings, registration service, etc; indicate the expected attendance upon which your budget is based; compare to previous CGOs; summarize it in an estimate of registration cost; factor in currency fluctuations; mention expected/known sponsors;
You then start the organization of the conference. A general rule: for each step, there is probably some information to be added on the web; keep that in mind at all times.
It's recommended to arrange the key committee members (financial chair and local chair) even earlier, at bidding time. If not already done, work is starting now, so you should have your committee. When you select the organizing committee, think also about potential sponsors. The different positions to fill are:
- Finance chair: the financial chair task, especially, is a very significant burden, in no small part because of the intricacies of the ACM/IEEE administration, but also because he/she is involved in almost every aspect of the conference.
- Local chair: in charge of all negotiations with the venue, catering, goodies, hotels, etc. Almost as key as the financial chair. Please be sure you clearly define the role of the local chair, it overlaps with many other chairs (registration, etc).
- Publicity chair: in charge of conference advertisement. While a dedicated publicity chair is great, with today's well organized mailing lists, like micro_publicity, a GC can feel bad to simply ask the publicity chair "please send that". One can wonder whether we still need such a position.
- Publications chair: in charge of collecting properly formatted articles, negotiating with the editing company, getting proceedings printed.
- Registration chair: in charge of negotiating with the registration service, answering day-to-day requests; during the registration period, the burden of the registration chair can be quite high.
- Tutorials/Workshops chair: in charge of the workshops/tutorials call, selection, organizing. Motivated tutorials/workshops chairs are key because the tutorials/workshops play a big role in beefing up your attendance.
- Sponsor chair: a newly created position which is quite useful because chasing sponsors can be very time-consuming.
- Students chair: has two main roles: organizing the students posters call and selection, and dealing with travel grants, including interacting with travel grants sponsors; can be a lot of work.
Pitfalls: Some suggest to have the GC also take the financial chair position. While the move makes a lot of sense because the two need to work closely and often, the consequence is also to almost double the workload of the GC. Only for very dedicated GCs :-) Beware that chairs will play a significant role in relieving the GC. So the primary criteria should be motivated, efficient and autonomous chairs. The ideal chair, for any position, is one who wants to make CGO a success, can handle most of the work by him/herself, sending the GCC the minimal number of emails, though raising key/controversial issues to the GC attention when needed.
In order to seriously enter the negotiations for the venue, you need to finalize the exact dates of the conference.
Pitfalls: Don't forget conflicts with other conferences (HIPEAC/ASPLOS/PLDI/MICRO for example); contact the GC/PC of these conferences. Naturally, sync with your own PC as the PC has its own date constraints, for instance to be able to send the notification before the PLDI deadline. Check local/national celebrations in hosting countries and abroad.
Time to really start the negotiation with the venue. You need to have a precise quote at this stage. The quote should include the following things:
- Conference room(s): Get an estimate of your attendance; since you have little visibility at this stage, you must plan for a possibly large attendance (max so far: about 200 for the conference); you also need to get an estimate of the number of workshops/tutorials, and deduce the total number of rooms you need.
- For workshops/tutorials, attendance can vary between 10 and 50 persons. You also need to have a room for the Business Meeting, and one for the private Steering Committee meeting.
- Video equipment: Video projectors are mysteriously pricey to rent at venues, so make sure you get a quote; for workshops/tutorials, you may want to bring a few from your own institution (reserve them in advance), it can save quite a bit; forget about asking workshops/tutorials organizers to bring them along, no one wants to carry these on a flight; also, don't forget screens: rooms which do not have white walls need screens ! Also, check that they have a technical service which can change bulbs or bring a replacement video projector in a few minutes.
- Catering: Potentially, there is a lot of catering to plan for: breaks (coffee, pastries), including for workshops; lunches (at least on the two/three days of the conference); reception (usually on Sunday of the conference): just drinks, or food ? banquet (usually on Monday or Tuesday); if you organize a poster session, it's really good to plan for drinks, as it motivates people to come and keeps them in the room; drinks for the business meeting, it helps lighten up the atmosphere; and make sure you keep the SC happy with drinks and food for the private SC meeting :-)
- Internet connection: Make sure it will be provided for free or include it in your contract, you don't want to ask your attendees to pay for Internet connection.
- Hotel rooms: The key negotiation is how many room nights you pledge to buy. Beware that if you fill less than that, you will still have to pay for them. It can become a major issue for your budget if attendance is low. It might be worth planning for a conservative estimate of the number of room nights, and identifying a number of close-by hotels in case attendance is greater than expected. An alternative is to separate the venue and the hotel rooms.
Pitfalls:
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The main venue pitfall is the contracted number of room nights; as explained above, better to plan for a conservative estimate of the number of rooms; in most areas, people can find hotels nearby, it's much less an issue than having to pay for unused room nights.
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While you need to start early the venue contract negotiation, it may actually be concluded pretty late, which is a bit stressful (CFP already sent, what if you need to change). Thus, follow the venue contract negotiation closely. Take the time to go visit the venue, the conference rooms, check the hotel rooms, even sample the food. The venue naturally has a major impact on how the conference is perceived.
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Because you have 0 visibility on the number of attendees, you want to try to negotiate a flexible contract: plan for a large room, but plan catering for a low attendance (e.g., 120 attendees); however make sure the contract gives you flexibility to increase the catering one week before the conference, it's only then that you will have a good estimate of the number of attendees !
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Check the Internet facility at the venue. You absolutely want to avoid 200 attendees who are utterly frustrated because they cannot connect. Ask how many hotspots the venue has (i.e., how many simultaneous connections they can service), and what is their global bandwidth. Bring a PC or iPhone, and using http://www.speedtest.net or another service, test the bandwidth yourself, the business people at venues do not understand how important Internet access is for our community. If the bandwidth is poor, just pick another venue. If the number of simultaneous connections is too low, that can be helped: ask them if they would agree to let you plug a switch connected to several hotspots into their router in order to boost the number of connections. It's easily done by your PhDs, but the venue must accept.
The first step is to get in touch with IEEE or ACM who are legally in charge of CGO. There is an agreement between ACM and IEEE and they alternate every year. So far, odd years are handled by IEEE, even years by ACM. You need to find the contact person at ACM or IEEE. The best is to ask the SC for that name. The main steps are described below.
Pitfalls: Dealing with IEEE or ACM can be fairly complicated, do not do this at the last minute, start very early. They are large organizations with complex procedures, not always easily understandable. Expect to spend a lot of time learning about what they require and in back and forths with ACM/IEEE officials.
For IEEE, you do that in the CIMA online software (at https://cima.computer.org/). There, you will declare the general chair and the finance chair.
The general chair and finance chair need to fill the COI (Conflict of Interest) form; the name is self-explanatory, you certify you have no conflict of interest with respect to the organization.
Pitfalls: There is a strict deadline for the COI, beware.
Get the ACM/IEEE template spreadsheet for the budget and fill it up; you obtain it from your contact person at ACM/IEEE. You need to submit this budget on the ACM/IEEE web site; automatic verifications will indicate if your budget is accepted (make sure you do not wreck the special format of the spreadsheet). Look at the previous years Main Conference Registration Fees. The average early registration fee for the main conference is around $450 when outside North America and $550 when in North America.
Pitfalls: It's not an easy task as some of the lines are unclear; you will need to do back and forths with the ACM/IEEE to figure it out.
Here you have to make a major decision: either have all contracts (venue, catering, etc) be signed by ACM/IEEE (the usual case), or have your own organization (University, Company) sign all contracts, on behalf of ACM/IEEE. For the latter case, you will need to sign a MOU (Memorandum Of Understanding) with ACM/IEEE. The MOU is meant to ensure that ACM/IEEE can monitor what you are doing with the money, including having access to the bank accounts used for the conference.
Pitfalls: It is strongly recommended to let ACM/IEEE sign all contracts. First and foremost, even if ACM/IEEE can be difficult to deal with, getting them to agree on the MOU can take a very long time. Second, ACM/IEEE have significant experience with hotels: it is normal to obtain free conference rooms, leaving only catering expenses. Delegate only if you have a good control over your internal administration, if it is flexible and will be ready to open its financial information to ACM/IEEE. Otherwise, don't do it.
Soon after you have finalized the venue selection, you need to start thinking about the excursion. There are a number of issues: do you want to do one ? Do you want to include the price in the registration, or make it optional ? The latter is a particularly difficult choice as events are typically costly and can significantly increase the registration price; but unattended excursions are dull. Successful excursions can contribute quite a bit to the atmosphere of the conference.
The PC meeting is the first thing the GC will have to organize. The PC selects the location, the GC needs to find a hotel, arranges for breaks and lunch, and possibly hotel rooms, and needs to factor in the traditional PC dinner in the budget.
Soon after the CGO of the previous year, at M-12, the publicity must start. So the CFP must be ready.
Similarly, the web site should be ready for publicizing the event in order to become live at M-12.
Start looking for sponsors. Do this early; for some companies it takes time to reach a decision. Besides your own contacts, ask for help from the SC and all the organizing committee. Plan broadly, most sponsorships are small but sponsoring is important for your budget.
If possible, try to organize satellite events together with CGO, in order to boost attendance.
The GC is naturally expected to attend the CGO of the previous year, especially to present the current status of your organization at the Business Meeting and at the private Steering Committee meeting. Also plan for a teaser at the end of the conference in order to publicize your event. Make sure your PC comes along.
Open the web site of your CGO event about one month after CGO Y-1, giving enough time to publicize the awards of CGO Y-1.
Start publicizing your event. From then on, do this regularly, about every 3 months, or even more frequently.
Start publicizing the call for workshops and tutorials at the same time. They play a big role for attracting participants.
Pitfalls: Don't just send the call. Pro-actively contact people around you to stimulate the organization of workshops and tutorials.
You need to start planning for the proceedings. You have two options:
- Go through ACM/IEEE. For IEEE, you need to do a "Conference Publishing Inquiry Submission" (CPS), see http://www.computer.org/cps.
- Go through a company approved by ACM/IEEE, such as Omnipress, see http://www.omnipress.com.
Requesting this grant can take a lot of time, so start early. It can be a large grant (e.g., $10,000), so don't ignore it. Contact the students chair of last year to know whom to contact. These grants are allocated to a US University which will be in charge of reimbursing travel grants. So identify that person (ideally your students chair) early on.
Remind the PC about three things: (1) best paper award committee, (2) keynote speaker, (3) artifact evaluation committee, (4) student research competition committee. Keep in touch with the PC to make sure they don't need anything from the GC. Ideally, find someone from the organizing committee to be on-site and serve as a liaison between the PC and the GC.
You will need to open it soon after the PC. Make sure you have listed all options:
- Faculty/Student Early/Late;
- Don't forget Lifetime members and retired members (same fare as students, usually);
- Workshops/Tutorials; even if you adopt the "all-you-can-eat" model, do ask which workshops/tutorials the participant will attend, the workshops/tutorials organizers want that info, and you need it also to plan for room capacity;
- Extra page charge (1 or 2) for authors;
- Special diet requirements;
- Participation to excursion, if applicable;
- Transportation, if applicable;
- Hotel selection, if applicable;
Check that the confirmation mail is OK as well. Have several organizing committee members test it. Need to make sure you can collect email addresses (to be sent to SIGMICRO who provides free membership -- contact Michael Gschwind). If possible provide a SIGMICRO membership registration link to the participants.
You can do this in different ways: let the workshops/tutorials chairs do it, have an organizing committee confcall, etc. You want quality workshops/tutorials but remember also (and again) that they will play an important role in attracting participants.
The accepted papers and workshops/tutorials are known, you can now prepare the schedule together with the PC. Besides papers (usually presented in 25+5 minutes at CGO), you need to fit the following things in the schedule:
- Welcome (15 minutes);
- Keynote(s);
- Sessions (+ breaks & lunches);
- Reception (usually on Sunday);
- ACM Student Research Competition (posters during reception and presentations during conference);
- Artificat Evaluation Discussion;
- Excursion;
- Awards ceremony (usually on Wednesday);
- Business meeting (sync with the SC chair);
- Private Steering Committee meeting (sync with the SC chair);
As soon as the PC is done, you can open registrations. You should not delay them beyond M-4 though: in some companies and institutions, they sometimes need to plan ahead of time. The now established policy at CGO is that corporate sponsors receive no free registration. 1 workshops/tutorials registration is granted to workshops/tutorials organizers to thank them for their efforts.
Pitfalls:
- Corporate sponsors will most likely ask for free registrations; stay courteous but firm about it (what is the point of having corporate sponsorships if it's eaten by free registrations ?).
- As mentioned before, you will have no visibility on the number of registrations until just a few days before the conference, beware.
- From then on, the registration chair can be frequently solicited for minor issues (my submission did not work, the web site froze, I cannot come in the end so can I get reimbursed, you forgot to add the fare for retired members, etc). Make sure the registration chair is reactive or forwards these mails to the GC.
- Clearly define your policy on registrations waivers in order to avoid delicate discussions and tradeoffs. We do not waive registration for the organizing committee (GC & PC included). It is traditional to offer the keynote speaker a complimentary registration.
The publisher will usually collect the PDFs of all papers. Stay on top of authors and make sure they do not delay in responding to the publishers emails. Proceedings can take a long time to prepare and authors frequently need additional time to correct mistakes found during the preparation of the proceedings.
Easily forgotten, but if you plan to distribute goodies, and have special labels on bags and such, it can take at least one month for a company to do that. Add to it the negotiation, the delivery, possible issues, and delays easily add up. It is recommended to start that around M-4.
Pitfall: Avoid things which cannot be stored in a carry-on luggage.
Time to get in touch with the keynote speaker, hopefully selected by the PC by then. The tradition at CGO is to offer a complimentary registration to the keynote speaker.
Start advertising student travel grants broadly.
The SRC is a great opportunity for students to interact with professionals and the broader community. Time to advertise it. Don't forget to mention it in the call. Absolutely organize a reception in the same room as the poster session to get people to come, stay and be in a good mood. Make sure the presentations are held during the regular conference program and do not conflict with business meetings, excursions or are too late or earlier for others to attend.
This is usually the period where things start to heat up, and the GC has to deal with all kinds of (usually small) troubles, coming from all chairs (or simply because some chairs are not sufficiently on top of things). It's best if it's not a too busy period for the GC, and if mails are answered promptly.
A non-exhaustive list:
- Create badge templates, buy badges;
- Discuss some local arrangements with the venue (table for registrations, power plugs everywhere in the conference room, serve special needs for tutorials rooms such as hands-on requiring tables and power plugs, etc);
- Recruit a few volunteers, at least a couple for the registration desk; a few more are useful to walk around the rooms during the conference, making sure everything is all right, or to serve as interface between the venue staff and the workshops/tutorials organizers;
- Will you accept on-site registrations ? Then how do people pay ?
- Did you receive goodies, have you arranged company booths ?
It is useful to email instructions to all participants with essential information (program, description of venue, workshops/tutorials rooms, how to access Internet, information on excursion, reception, poster session, etc).
Redispatch workshops and tutorials rooms based on known attendance.
Get the infos about all your organizing committee (when do they arrive, what hotel they stay at, what is their cell phone number), and broadcast that information to all the organizing committee so that people can easily get in touch at the venue in case there is a problem.
The GC must give two presentations: a report at the business meeting, and the welcome presentation at the beginning of the conference.
Absolutely arrive at least one day before at the venue. Check all the rooms arrangements, Internet, power plugs, location of registration desk, get acquainted with venue staff, etc.
Frequently interact with all organizing committee and venue staff to make sure everything is running smoothly.
Publicize the awards on the web site. Thank your organizing committee for their hard work ! Send the final numbers to IEEE/ACM for auditing. Organize a survey about your conference and send it to all registered participants. Send the report to NSF and SIGPLAN EC. Send the list of attendees + email addresses (ACM members to SIGPLAN) for them to get a one year complimentary membership