Technology Conferences: What Does Sponsorship Money Buy?
March 14, 2022
I have attended a number of conferences in my 50 year work career. Here’s what I learned:
- Giving a conference organizer money can provide access to the attendee list with phone number and email addresses
- Paying for a cocktail, breakfast, or some other gathering within the conference can include a speaking slot
- Supporting the conference with a payment can result in one of those logo-bedecked bags provided to each and every attendee whether the attendee wants the useless pouch or not
- Offering cash may allow a special information channel; for example, a contributor being able to provide a video commercial into each attendee’s hotel room. (Yep, I remember, the Chemical Abstracts’ video in London a decade ago)
- Coughing up money results in slots on the program and these talks are not on the last day of the conference at the tail end of the program day. Nope. These slots are keynotes or hour long masterpieces of PowerPointery.
Now you get the idea.
“The Tech Industry Controls CS Conference Funding. What Are the Dangers?” explains a more interesting and somewhat more conceptual approach to paying conference organizers big money or small money over, under, or on the table.
The write up points out that a role in selecting the topics and who can talk. That’s the nifty part. The attendee perceives the conference lectures as neutral. Often a panel of “experts” reviews the abstracts and interacts with the speakers. Some conferences offer helpful guidelines. Do conference funding sources manipulate the knobs and dials of the program itself? Yep, conference organizers love to play ball, have favorites (Isn’t Google special?), and their own industry biases (How about quantum computing for intelligence professionals?)
I noted this statement in the cited article:
Relying on large companies and the resources they control can create significant limitations for the kinds of CS research that are proposed, funded and published. The tech industry plays a large hand in deciding what is and isn’t worthy of examination, or how issues are framed. For instance, a tech company might have a very different definition of privacy from that which is used by consumer rights advocates. But if the company is determining the parameters for the kinds of research it wishes to sponsor, it can choose to fund proposals that align with or uphold its own interpretation.
Let’s imagine a hypothetical conference about smart software. The funding entities are part of the Stanford AI Lab persuasion. What happens when Dr. Timnit Gebru and her fellow travelers propose a paper? In an objective, academic, Ivory Tower world, the papers are picked based on some arbitrary set of PhD-infused criteria? What happens if an IBM- or Google-type outfit funds the conference? Forget that Ivory Tower handwaving. The idea will be to advance the agenda. Snorkel, cognitive computing, whatever.
What happens when a history major with an MBA attends the conference looking for something in which to invest his financial firm’s hard earned assets? Is this MBA able to differentiate the goose feathers from the giblets? In my opinion, the MBA will select from the knowledge buffet. Think about a boxed conference lunch sponsored by the keynote speaker’s company? Do you want cheese with your chicken or do you want cheese? See there is a choice. In reality, one takes what is served.
Even “research” has been converted into information warfare. Objective and exciting, right?
Is the conference organizer complicit? Yep.
Stephen E Arnold March 14, 2022
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