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April 2011: ISRSE34 in Sydney: When are exploited scientists going to speak up? I am currently at the ISRSE34 conference in Sydney, Australia. In registration fees, this conference is the most expensive one I ever attended (a total of AUD 970 for the conference and a pre-conference workshop, which I organized but nevertheless had to pay for, which translates into more than $1,000!). And it is among the worst in organization, the lowest in what is offered, and the highest in mistakes being made.

It looks to me like unqualified and unprofessional conference organizers have discovered scientists as an easy to exploit animal species, which come with lower maintenance costs than chickens but are as willingly giving up their eggs as the silliest chicken to be found on Earth. Registration cost for the one-day workshop was AUD 120, and the promise was that we'd get morning and afternoon coffee and tea and a nice meeting room. The meeting room was a very small class room in a university building with poor chairs not made for people sitting there all day. The 'coffee' was hot water with small amounts of low-quality brown powder added to make a horrible drink. Almost everybody at the workshop made comments about the poor facilities, and the undrinkable coffee. I felt embarrassed to have invited people to come to a Sunday workshop under such conditions. But, as the good chickens we are, we conducted a very good workshop, laid our eggs, and went off without complaints - almost: Today I decided that it is not enough to speak up against the big injustices like ethnic or gender discrimination, war, and the exploitation of the poor by the rich, developing countries by developed countries, and women by men; it is also important to speak up against emerging new tendencies like to exploitation of scientists by a growing industry that sees potentially rapid earnings in organizing the conferences for these naive and content-with-nothing individuals: big evil starts small.

After many difficulties in uploading abstracts, manuscripts, and presentations, which all had to be produced exclusively using software products of one company (maybe due to a sponsor agreement between the organizers and that company?), today at the registration, they added another unbelievable mistake: my name tag read “University of Hans-Peter”.

The conference program appears to be surrealistic, floating around like the shapes in Dali's painting “The Persistence of Memory”. Yesterday, I learned that a session was moved very recently from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning, which means for me that I now have to give two presentations at the same time. Women are know to be able to do multi-tasking, but as a simple male, I just can't figure out how they do it. Complaining to the organizers earned me suggestions for solutions as stupid as this one: “Maybe you can find somebody else who can give one of the two presentations for you?” - can it get any more stupid? Did I travel from the U.S. to Australia, pay a grand in fees, just to have to find somebody else to deliver my speech? The conference organizers have absolutely no concern for the participants. They have no understanding of how we live and how we conduct our work. Very seldom do we today have time to spend five days at a conference. Way ahead we find out when our presentations are, and we restrict participation to these days. This does not match with surrealistic programs but rather requires some degree of deterministic planning.

Do I have to mention that the coffee at the conference is only marginally better than what they offered to us during the workshop?

Events organized by scientists for scientists generally turn out cheaper, with higher quality (not just of the coffee), and more rewarding. I guess, in the future, it is not just the topic and relevance that will determine whether or not to spend precious time at a conference but also the type of organizers. Those new comers among the commercial conference organizers who think we are just cows to be milked should be proven wrong.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.