siggraph@watcgl.waterloo.edu (SIGGRAPH (Kelly Booth)) (07/21/89)
This year, for SIGGRAPH '89, the registration fees will be (essentially) identical to what they were in 1988, 1987, and 1986. Minor changes were made each year, mostly to rationalize the relative costs of the different options. But the basic registration fees did not change significantly. Starting in 1985, SIGGRAPH adopted a financial plan that included making an annual surplus of about $500,000 each year from the conference (this was to be indexed by 5% each year for inflation). This currently represents about a 10% "profit". On average for the last three years, the conferences have earned more surplus than this. The SIGGRAPH executive committee and the SIGGRAPH conference planning committee have agreed each year to keep the registration fees at the same level as long as the conference maintains its surplus (the financial plan calls for a 5% increase in fees each year, but this has not been applied for three years). The primary reason that the conferences have in fact exceeded the target surplus has been the ever-improving management of the conference. It is simply costing less to deliver more. (Increasing attendance has helped too, but not as much as you might think. Mostly it is better management). As long as this continues, it is reasonable to expect that registration fees will stay at the current level. Of course there will eventually come a time when further improvements are harder to make. So registration fees will have to start tracking inflation. But for four years they have stayed constant. Where does the surplus go? Lots of places. SIGGRAPH uses the conference surplus to underwrite smaller, more focussed conferences and workshops. And to fund things like Project Mathematics! at Caltech (SIGGRAPH has provided $170,000 in seed money over the past two years -- this enabled Tom Apostol, Jim Blinn, and the rest of the team to keep things going while other funding came in. NSF has now joined in funding of the project.) Grants are provided to educators to attend workshops and courses at the conference each year to improve access to computer graphics in colleges and universities where there are not sufficient programs in place.