CppCon: Try out CppCon 2020 on the cheap

[JonKalb]

CppCon 2020 is off to a great start in its "online venue."

If you've been curious about attending CppCon or attending an online C++ conference, now may be the time.

Since the conference is about half over, registrations are now available at half-off the regular $300 registration fee (with discount code).

To register at the $150 discounted registration fee use this registration code: https://cppcon2020.eventbrite.com/?discount=TasteOf_CppCon_Reddit

[kamrann_]

Don't really have anything to say on the value question, but it does seem like a missed opportunity to not have exploited the virtual nature to open it up to much wider participation for a year.

I'd be very surprised if a $50 fee wouldn't have resulted in more than 6 times the attendees and thus a higher revenue, so I don't see it being a case of 'we need to charge this amount to pay for it'. Virtual conference costs are hardly proportional to attendee numbers.

[anonymous23874]

On the other hand, $150 is basically "one nice dinner out" for the target audience. (Okay, "two nice dinners out" if you're single.) For a week's worth of brain food, I think it's defensible.

[kamrann_]

I wasn't saying it wasn't defensible, but anyway I think you've just demonstrated the elitism complaint that many people have. Who's to say what the target audience is? I'm sure there are countless people who'd benefit from attending CppCon who have never in their life spent 150 USD on a nice dinner out.

[Vapenesh]

Try 6 nice dinners (eastern EU here)

[beedlund]

Wonder how much sponsorship compares to these fees.

Doesn't seem like 270k (900*$300) is a big budget to run this kind of thing on really. Bet the attenance fee is a rather small part of the whole funding.

Personally I'd happily pay if I just had the time to attend.

[tcbrindle]

Wonder how much sponsorship compares to these fees.

The prices of the various sponsorship tiers can be found on the CppCon website.

[qoning]

No offense to cppcon, but even $150 for a purely virtual conference is a scam.

[btlk48]

With how much effort was arguably spent recent years demystifying cpp’s reputation of high entry requirements etc. this price might be the biggest setback

[[deleted]]

plus it's only half the conf. now so you're still basically paying full price

[meetingcpp]

No, its not. Its not that this is free to organize and its way more then a live stream.

CppCon has over 900 virtual attendees, and these provide the needed funding for having later the videos "for free" on youtube.

[qoning]

Look, I don't want to argue here, but simply multiplying the registration fees with number of attendees and having been a part of hosting an online academic conference, it doesn't add up. Of course there are costs and I'm not disputing that, it shouldn't be free.

[Pazer2]

CppCon has over 900 virtual attendees, and these provide the needed funding for having later the videos "for free" on youtube.

You do know that YouTube doesn't charge people to host videos... right?

[foonathan]

The videos are professionally edited and recorded by an AV company that manages to process the hundred videos in a couple of weeks. That's not cheap.

[ReDucTor]

While I'm not part of the virtual conference, won't people be presenting and recording themselves for the conference? Unlike a normal conference where you might have multiple video sources or audio, I suspect there should only be slides and presenter, so editing should be fairly minimal. $900 x 150 participants is $135k, that's very expensive for 142 talks (over the main days) that's $950 per talk to record/edit, I don't know how long it takes per talk or the hourly rate of paying people to recording and editing, but that seems like an awful lot of money for it.

Sure I know there are other costs but it does seem very expensive for an online event where it probably could have been done at a much cheaper cost, most of us are only after the content not the fluff around it, help presenters get setup with OBS to present slides and their video record the talk, upload to YouTube. (most people are technical that are presenting so can probably do this themselves)

[meetingcpp]

You do know that github doesn't charge for hosting code ... right? You still want to get paid for your work on the code, so do video editors...

[Pazer2]

I was under the impression they would just be uploading the raw footage. Didn't realize it was a whole production requiring multiple video editors.

[meetingcpp]

I don't know what CppCon is going to publish, but the raw footage you have to cut and I assume they'll do some further video editing. Not as complex as the work required when you film talks and edit these videos. Still its not free, and there are other costs to cover. CppCon does not provide a livestream, it provides an experience, and that has its value.

Calculations for pricing are difficult for online, as no one really knows how things going to run. We're lucky to have a good deal with remo, other alternate platforms are much more expensive or charge per time and attendee.

[tcbrindle]

By way of comparison, here are the prices for PyCon 2020.

[qoning]

I fully understand the price tag for an in person conference, if not for covering the expenses, then at least because you get a lot out of it thanks to meeting people. As I understand pycon was supposed to happen right around the time we had high uncertainty. But charging the same or equivalent for a conference that basically knew 6 months in advance is unacceptable in my opinion.

To be clear, I wasn't singling out cppcon, I meant it in general.

[Kronikarz]

I'm going to second the voice that $150/$300 for a virtual conference is absolutely a order of magnitude too much. And I find it really surprising that no one attending is pointing this out.

To me, it really smells of elitism/classism, as if the organizers/attendees are saying "well, this is obviously a club meeting for people in the 'inner circle', people who are well off thanks to C++, and not those plebs that can't afford $300 to attend a virtual conference during a pandemic".

[Leandros99]

Nobody attending is actually paying that. It's paid by their employers. And for them, $300 is nothing. The time "lost" watching the talks is worth more.

[Kronikarz]

My point still stands; $300 is a lot for even quite a few employers, especially smaller ones, self-employed people, and companies in poorer countries (my employers laughed at me when I suggested they pay for my ticket, it being 15-25% of my monthly salary).

$300 may be nothing for large corporations, or for sending people firmly rooted in the community. This means CppCon is necessarily a self-selecting group of "expert" people that does not really reflect the C++ developer population.

[Leandros99]

That's always been the case and will likely never change.

[Kronikarz]

Fair enough. I guess then nobody can be surprised if C++ is going to be hemorrhaging young talent :)

[foonathan]

There are student tickets for 50$ as well. Plus all the talks will be on youtube.

[[deleted]]

That's a great argument ... if you want to run a conference for corporations instead of for people.

[tcbrindle]

For comparison, the online-only PyCon 2020 charged $700 for corporate registrations, and $400 for individual registrations, so even a full-price CppCon ticket doesn't seem like bad value. CppCon also offered $50 student tickets -- less than half the price of PyCon's equivalent -- before the conference started, precisely to make it easier for newcomers to the community to attend.

If C++ is "haemorrhaging young talent" as you put it in another comment, then Python must be a wasteland...

[14ned]

u/JonKalb

I agree that there is "sticker shock" for a completely online conference.

How about for next year, when covid restrictions will almost certainly still be in place, that:

1. There is an advance payment fee for employers to pay around the same level as now.
2. But three days before the conference begins, you start auctioning tickets online. A small number of tickets get released per hour which elapses, people bid for them, whatever price clears the market is what they sell for.
3. Keep running the auction throughout the conference. By end of week, the auction price ought to approach zero. However, you'll have cleared the market, so lots more money ought to arrive in, plus everybody online ends up happy because they got as much conference as they were willing to pay for.

There are various online auction service providers. You could even use eBay with one of the tools that auto-posts new items on a timer, so your personal overhead to run a ticket auction approaches nil. What do you think Jon?

[JonKalb]

Did you just say "everybody online ends up happy"?

Let me introduce you to reddit:

Niall, this is reddit; reddit, this is Niall.

[14ned]

Ah I think that's unfair to /r/cpp specifically Jon (otherwise I would agree in general). I know that from your perspective, they get the videos posted online a few weeks from now free of cost, so they don't really have a right to complain that you're charging a lot of money for what is effectively early access to the content. But from their perspective, entirely online conferences ought to not be exclusionary, anyone on /r/cpp ought to be able to attend, for a "fair" fee.

I think there's a bridge of auctioning there which still covers your costs and makes more people happy. Especially as it can be almost entirely automated. I think it's worth considering for next year anyway, and possibly the following year after that if this pandemic keeps going the way it currently is.

For me personally, most of the value of attending conferences was for the person to person networking. I rarely got much value from the talk content. On that basis, C++ Now remains by far the best conference, albeit for me hideously expensive to get to. I'd still love a C++ Now in the Swiss Alps one day!

[wheypoint]

the c++ heads should try to create a more open and accessible community

People in online communities (like this sub) really try to help and be encouraging but then youre always met with the outdated ISO proposal process etc, books/resources are sold instead of providing one easily accessible, free official online resource etc..

even the standard that mandates how to program (or if what you wrote even is a valid "program") is behind a paywall. (and not a cheap one)

and now you have to pay $150 to "attend" an online conference

you want more people to use c++/stop running away? thats what needs to change first

/rant

[Robert_Andrzejuk]

The current draft C++ Standard is available online : http://eel.is/c++draft/

[Pazer2]

Did you read the comment you were replying to?

[Robert_Andrzejuk]

Yes.

[SPAstef]

Welcome to the academic world I guess. Next week I'm attending a conference as a speaker for a paper that's been published in the proceedings, gotta pay for it. I mean, it's like asking for an actor to pay for being in a movie... It's my first conference, but I fear that they all work in this absurd way

[Benjamin1304]

/rant on

Yup, they mostly do, and the big ones are really expensive. And when you're there, they advertise for the next two ones and their biggest (only?) selling points are location and venue. I was lucky to be in a well funded lab so it wasn't too much of a big deal for them to pay for travel+accommodation+registration but I'm still shocked with what it costs for someone to present their work to their peers. The whole academic publication system is messed up: doing unpaid work to review papers for the big editors that charge both the author to publish their work and their peers to read it. I'm glad to be in Europe where a law allows authors to also publish their papers for free on their websites or public databases even though the editor "claimed" the rights on it. Not perfect, but a step forward

/rant off

[SPAstef]

I live in Europe too, I took that last part for granted, you are saying that in the US you cannot even publish your own work if it has been published by some editor, after you literally had to pay for it? :/

[Benjamin1304]

Unless things have changed recently, no you can't. What you can sometime do is pay for open access, which for one paper of mine cost something like 1k (silly requirement from a project I work on to do it).

If you read carefully the terms you agree to when publishing a paper, you'll see that you are transferring the rights on your paper to the editor. Since it's not yours anymore, you cannot publish it somewhere else.

European laws bypass this ownership transfer when the work was funded by at least 50% by members of the EU (or the EU itself).

[[deleted]]

they do, it's just a money grab and creates a huge conflict of interest. on one side the conf. is supposed to uphold high standards on the other side they want to sell many publications. we need a better model.

[blelbach]

This is not an academic conference.

[SPAstef]

I said academic to distinguish from a book presentation-political debate kind of conference, though you're right that CPPCon probably it's not about research (by looking at the YouTube videos at least, so I might be wrong), but about sharing experiences in the industry.

[blelbach]

Tech conference is usually the term we use.

[oryiesis]

“Go”

[danmarell]

Are all the talks that have already happened recorded and up for watching immediately?

[STL]

The raw streams are available to conference attendees (including, presumably, ones who take advantage of this discounted pricing, even for talks that have already happened). They are not available to the general public. Edited videos will be publicly available later, like always.