Psych vs. Tech Conferences Head-to-Head

Attending APA and a tech conference (posit::conf) back to back in the same city and almost the same facilities really highlights what you get for your registration money!

At full rate, APA is priced moderately for a general professional conference: this year, $515 for three days of content. SIOP in contrast is priced a bit aggressively, at $455. People often complain about what you get for what seems like a big price tag, which essentially boils down to “access to presentations” and “food/coffee at breaks.” Coffee itself is surprisingly expensive – between $125-$450 per coffee urn, which serves abi it $50 people, so roughly $2-$9 per person for what is quite bad coffee.

So what happens if you pay more? Well that’s what tech conferences do. Posit is the company behind RStudio, which is a public benefit corporation. They have a public good mission on top of a profit motive. So they try to price their conference aggressively for that audience. What does “aggressively priced” mean in tech?

General registration is $1100. Workshops are around $600 each. And the conference is 2 days with 1-4 tracks of content depending on time of day, in contrast to SIOP with 3 days and ~22 tracks. Many tech conferences are double or triple that fee. Microsoft for example charges almost $2000 for its “community conference,” although this is a 3-day event.

What do you get for it? At posit::conf, lunch is provided – a very good salmon today with opera cakes for dessert. There are many “free” receptions daily with open bars. Hosted, carefully designed events run every evening. During the lunch hour, there are barista stations offering “free” espresso based drinks. Staff are absolutely everywhere, all ready to help. And 100% of sessions – although this is only max 4 rooms at a time – are broadcast live for a virtual audience.

It is a difficult balance from a planning perspective. Tech conferences can use this model because they know many tech companies won’t sneeze at a $2000 registration fee if content is aligned with the work they’re doing. But in IO, this would price a lot of people out, especially students. Even here, which I will reiterate is cheap for a tech conference, the student registration fee is around $600, triple the SIOP student rate. So that means SIOP conference planners make tradeoffs in the quality of experience to make the conference accessible to a broad, diverse audience of IOs.

What balance would you prefer at SIOP? Do you like the balance that’s been struck so far?