Did you get your Kalamazoo program today?
Did it seem... small?
I flipped to the back, and rather than the usual 700-odd (some very odd) panels, there were only 574. So I'm not imagining things.
We're not your typical conference.What do we think? Off year? Trending downwards? Restricted travel budgets?
And the pearlescent pea-soup color for this year: love, or hate?
9 comments:
It's gotten way too large, with too many mediocre papers. Smaller is better!
Come on, Anon: Since when has K'zoo ever been about the papers?
My prediction is that all conferences will get smaller: people have smaller travel budgets, and since they are not getting raises, paying for their own conference travel will be more of a stretch...
Yes--what Susan said. Our travel budget has gone from small to minuscule, and what with the paycuts in the form of higher insurance premiums and increased required retirement contributions, plus looming furloughs, etc., many of us here just can't justify the out of pocket expense.
In the postscript to his welcome letter, James Murray explains it was a deliberate choice to downsize for 2011 "in order to better meet the technical and logistical demands" of the Congress. So it sounds like they got as many, if not more, proposals as usual, but accepted fewer than in recent years.
Bloody Blogger ate the first take at this, but I'll try again.
The pea-green is a bit horrible, IMO, and the size difference is unmissable. But the panel numbers doesn't tell you the whole story, weirdly. Unless I'm going mad and/or can't count, the number of participants is about the same, if not larger: 46 nearly-full columns of 53 names each, with some gaps between letters, as opposed to 46 columns, 2 half-full, of 52 names each with the same number of gaps. Either they've made the gaps subtly bigger this year or we have the same or greater number of people coming to less of a conference. I thought there seemed to be a lot of four-or-more-paper panels but I didn't expect it to be verifiable by maths. What's going on?
A rapid comparison with Leeds, by the way, which can only be rough because the Leeds sessions aren't consecutively numbered and I'm not counting them, so I have to take the programmers' words for it: about 400 panels, both this year and last, and '1350+' participants, down from exactly 1374, at print time. So whatever the matter is it might be US-specific.
(Forgive lack of OpenID authentication: that seems to be what Blogger is choking on now.)
I've actually noticed that other conferences are shrinking ...so its not just this one. I'm also hearing from colleagues that they can't attend as many conferences they used to attend due to: shrinking travel budgets and being forced to pay for more things out of their own (shrinking) pockets.
it's Chartreuse and I love it. Except that it looks really nasty next to last year's color. They really need to think about how these things add up. And yeah, smaller. But lighter, too!
My paper wasn't accepted this year (for the first time), and I'm hoping that its due to the shrinking budgets and not saying anything about my ability to write a good paper. At the same time, I suppose it's a good thing because I'll save the money I would have spent out of pocket for the trip.
Post a Comment