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Did you know that the single largest expense category for VIS is food and beverage (F&B)? It’s a surprising fact for many, but it’s the reality we face as organizers.

The Devil Bargin

Our contract with the hotel is a bit of a devil’s bargain. We get the space “free,” but the hotel recoups its costs through hotel rooms and F&B charges. This means that, much like when you throw a wedding, the prices for food and drinks are… well, far from ideal. For example, coffee — your average conference coffee, mind you — costs around $100 per gallon. Yes, you read that right. That means each cup of so-so drip coffee costs over $6.

Why Isn’t the Coffee Better?

Most conferences have passable to terrible coffee. VIS 2023 had AMAZING coffee (kudos). I hope our coffee will be passable. It is a market problem, namely the market for supplying good coffee at conferences is not there.

Let me put that into perspective for you: we have 7 morning coffee events (Sun-Fri), 7 morning breaks (Sun-Fri), and 6 afternoon breaks (Sun-Thur). That’s 20 coffee events. If we serve 400 cups of coffee per event on average (assuming $100/gal and 16 cups per gal), we’re looking at nearly $50,000 — just on boring coffee, not the fancy stuff. Keep in mind, that’s not necessarily coffee consumed, but coffee served. We have to estimate how much will be drunk, and we’re charged based on that guess.

Now, we could spring for more expensive coffee, but that would have to take away from other F&B. For example, besides coffee, we’ll also have light snacks during the breaks. I won’t get into specifics, but that banana you grabbed and maybe didn’t even eat? It probably cost us around $5.

Party Like It’s $1999

In addition to breaks, we have several networking/social events, each with a per-person budget. For example, we expect to spend around $50 per person for the reception, $25 per person for the VISAP reception, $120 per person for the banquet, and $10 per person for happy hours. Take the $50 per person reception, for instance. For that, you can expect one drink and service of three light hors d’oeuvres and a small sweet treat — definitely not the full restaurant meal you might imagine for $50.

All in all, we’re expecting to spend between $300 and $350 per person on F&B, and that’s taking into account the fact that not everyone stays for the whole week or attends every event. F&B alone will consume about 40-50% of our budget.

What Does This Mean for Me?

I fully expect that some people will complain — that there wasn’t enough food, that it wasn’t great quality — and I completely understand. From their perspective, it is objectively true. However, we’re doing the best we can within the constraints we have. The reality is that conference F&B is much more expensive than in regular life, and it’s a fact that doesn’t always translate to attendees. One more thing to keep in mind when you complain: food made in large volumes is never quite as good as something cooked to order. That’s just a reality of scale, not a reflection on the hardworking hotel staff. Next time you cook dinner for 500, let me know how good it is.

When you’re at the conference, sipping on your $6 coffee, try to keep in mind the behind-the-scenes efforts and costs that go into making it all happen. We’re working hard to make sure the experience is as good as it can be — both on and off your plate. See you on the beach!

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Being the General Chair of VIS looked like a great opportunty to fix all the things that I thought could be improved with the conference. We started with ambitious goals, but reality of time, effort, and enthusiam really kicked back. During the first two years of planning for IEEE VIS, much of our time was spent discussing ways to improve the conference. Some changes required approvals from the VEC and VSC, and while they approved some, others were denied. Certain modifications, however, fell within the general chair’s purview. Through this process, we learned a valuable lesson—change is hard. Despite our best efforts, we accomplished around 25% of what we set out to do. It was frustrating at times, but ultimately, it was worth it.

Engaging Industry and Practitioners

VIS has long faced challenges in engaging industry participants, and we spent considerable time discussing how to address this issue. While we had numerous ideas, ranging from introducing industry tracks to rethinking the program, none materialized into a singular, actionable plan this year. Nevertheless, we made some progress with practitioner communities. In the spring, we formed a partnership with the Data Visualization Society (DVS), including exhibitor space at the Outlier conference, which will be reciprocated at VIS. DVS representatives are also participating in a VisInPractice panel this year. Additionally, we partnered with HETUG (Higher Education Tableau Users Group), which will host a VIS watch party. These partnerships are exciting, and we hope they will continue.

Program Changes

General Chairs have limited control over the program, but thanks to close relationships with two program chairs (Kate, who works a few doors down from me, and Lane who is a friend and former student of Remco), we managed to make some positive changes. One long-standing issue was the structure of Tuesday’s program, which we have now rearranged to enhance the attendee experience.

We moved the Test of Time (ToT) awards to Friday, splitting them from the VGTC awards, to avoid a 1.5-hour awards block that could feel excessive for non-regular attendees. We also pushed for an earlier keynote on Tuesday to avoid filling the first session with administrivia. We streamlined non-essential elements to reduce the overall time, and we made adjustments to the VIS Arts Program (VISAP) and poster session, ensuring both events received better attendance by aligning them in adjacent spaces with exciting content. VISAP has an exciting keynote speaker this year. So, we decided to have the VISAP keynote right after the main program (making it easier for attendees to stick around). Immediately after that, the VISAP reception and poster session begin in adjacent spaces.

Social Events

While the program is largely out of our hands, General Chairs have full control over social events, which, happens to be one of our specialties. Networking is a major reason people attend conferences, so we ensured plenty of opportunities for attendees to connect. In addition to the standard morning and afternoon breaks, we organized evening events like the conference reception on Sunday, the VISAP reception on Tuesday, and the banquet on Wednesday. We’ve also added happy hours on Monday and Thursday after the sessions. Coffee will still be available first thing in the morning, but due to cost, we can’t offer food.

Virtual Participation

The virtual component of VIS has been an ongoing conversation. Personally, I dislike attending virtual conferences, but I 100% believe in providing the option, as it enhances inclusivity and expands the community. After fully virtual events in 2020 and 2021, a hybrid model in 2022, and a purely in-person event in 2023, we aimed to strike a balance this year. We went into this year thinking that it was our job to find a model that might be sustainable longer term. However, in retrospect, I don’t think it will be, at least not entirely. Our approach was to split the virtual and in-person components to provide flexibility. While there were many pros and cons to this model, and we have many conversations about them. However, I still believe it was the right decision.

Argh Matey Get Ye Swag

A personal initiative of mine was the introduction of a swag shop using a print-on-demand supplier. Uptake hasn’t been great, but I’m looking forward to sporting some VIS 24 swag at the conference.

Simple Changes

We asked a lot of committees for “simple” changes. Some of these were genuinely easy. Some of them look easy but were actually hard. The biggest ones that come to mind are first poster printing. I went out and found us a good deal for having posters printed at VIS. Now, we are printing all of the main track posters. Note that the poster chairs are manage a whole bunch of new logistics, so thanks to them. The other big one that comes to mind is the website. The virtual/content site is now integrated into the main site. It is a square peg, round hole situation that took a lot of effort to connect, but the web team made it look realtively seemless. There were many other suggestions we made along the way, some we were taken up on, some were ignored (which is fine). Some changes are completely community driven, e.g., there are a couple of new demo tracks this year that come to mind.

Administrative Changes

Most administrative adjustments often go unnoticed or unappreciated by attendees. These changes are essential, but not always visible. Of course, each year there are minor stylistic adjustments, such as how meetings are conducted. One of our major goals was to streamline the organization by combining certain committees. For instance, we merged Inclusivity and Accessibility; Community, Meetups, and Elections; and Panels with Tutorials. We aimed to go even further, as VIS has an expansive organizing structure relative to its attendance. However, of the seven major restructuring proposals we made, only three were approved.

Retrospective

Looking back, we accomplished more than it might seem at first glance. Every change, even small ones, took a huge amount of time and effort, not only from us but also from those who reviewed and implemented the changes. We are immensely grateful to everyone who contributed to making this possible. Next time we’re in charge (not happening), we will make even more progress!

The good news? Most attendees probably won’t even notice the bulk of these changes—and that’s okay. There’s comfort in familiarity. We look forward to seeing everyone on the beach soon!

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Staying in the conference hotel is an important part of keeping our conference healthy. While understandably, it may not work financially for all attendees, having attendees together creates a strong community atmosphere, and it is an important part of venues bidding on hosting future VIS conferences. We often struggle to find venues because we don’t book enough room nights.

Carnac the Magnificent

When the TradeWinds contract was signed two years ago, we set up a block of rooms with approximately ZERO idea of how many people would want to come or stay in the conference hotel. Room nights are booked on a truncated normal distribution, and past history told us how many rooms we should expect “on-peak” (Wednesday night), which was 280.  I didn’t think much of this number at the time, and we relied on the experience of Loretta Auvil and Maria Velez (long-time finance chairs) and Michelle Ocampo from IEEE, but we did all this during the peak of COVID-19. So, it was really anyone’s guess.

August was an eye-opening month …

In early summer, the hotel set up the booking site for us, and rooms were slowly booked out of our block.

Then, August hit. People started booking a lot of rooms. We quickly started to run out of individual nights, even though we had plenty of total nights, and for obvious reasons, that caused problems. We had to repeatedly contact the hotel, asking them to add nights or move nights. They would help, but only in small increments. As time went on, we started to run low on total nights (a good problem to have). This created the need to add an addendum to our contract, which was a whole mess of its own. The result of all of this was spending way too many hours in August answering e-mails, on Zoom, and making phone calls about hotel rooms. Special thanks to Kathy Park, our current IEEE event planner (who I’m sure is sick of me by now), for doing so much of this. Note that I’m really downplaying what an enormous challenge this was for the team.

Oh the attrition

The from the conference perspective one critical hotel block concept is the attrition fee. In our original contract, the hotel assigned us ~1600 nights with an attrition fee for any utilization under 80% (this was revised to ~1800 nights and 90% in our addendum). The key idea is that for every night underutilized, the conference is financially responsible. So, under our current agreement, if we use 1620 nights or more (90% of 1800), no problem. However, if we only use 1600 nights, the conference is then responsible for the balance of 20 nights, a $5,000 expense! Keep in mind to 20 nights is only 4 5-night reservations. Obviously, this can be disastrous. The good news as of writing this is that the hotel block is very full, but we are still could be at risk if people change their plans and don’t use all the nights they have booked.

Being a Good Hotel Block Citizen

Here are some tips and tricks for being a good hotel block citizen (to some extent these matter less for this year, but keep them in mind for the future):

• Book your room early! If we know we need extra rooms early, it is easier to get more than at the last minute.
• Don’t book for more time than you need just because you’re not sure. Every night you book takes a night away from the block that someone else could use.
• Don’t hold a booking and release it late! Similar reason. Further, releasing rooms late hurts our attrition if they aren’t taken by someone else.
• Unused rooms due to being unbooked, CANCELLED, or EARLY DEPARTURE may HURT THE CONFERENCE FINANCIALLY. These unplanned costs can make future VIS conferences more expensive!

Obviously, things happen, plans change, and we have wiggle room built in. My goal is just to give you a sense of how your choices impact others and the conference.

I’m truly glad to be almost done worrying about the hotel block, and I hope to never have to deal with this problem again. That said, I’m remain excited for the start of IEEE VIS 2024. See you all in Florida!

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As the General Chair for VIS 2024, I’ve had the unique opportunity to witness and guide the conference’s evolution from a mere concept to what will soon be a reality. I remember, as a student, arriving at my first several conferences with basically no concept of how they happened. This journey began back in March 2021 when I submitted the hosting bid for what would ultimately become VIS 2024. At that time, I was an assistant professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa (hence our ultimate location).

An Uncertain Time

We were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our community had just experienced its first fully virtual VIS conference, which was supposed to be held in Salt Lake City. Planning was already underway for another virtual event “in” New Orleans, and Australia was scheduled to host in 2022 with an unclear format due to Australia’s COVID-19 policy at the time. My original bid was to host VIS in Florida in 2023, but as we now know, the Oklahoma City crew stepped up big time in 2022, pushing Australia to 2023 and Florida to 2024.

Looking back at the landscape in March 2021, VIS in Florida had the potential to be the first in-person conference after a series of virtual events. That was both an exciting and daunting prospect—an opportunity to reunite our community in a physical space after years of separation. While Florida is often the object of jokes (e.g., see “Florida man”), it’s undeniably a popular destination with plenty of outdoor appeal, front and center.

I submitted the bid on my own, with the idea of selecting co-chairs if the bid was accepted. Not long after I placed the bid, it was provisionally accepted. Over the course of the summer, I asked Kristi and Remco, each of whom I’ve known for a long time, to join me as co-chairs.

How a Bid Becomes a Contract

Our search for a venue focused on Tampa and Orlando. Our IEEE event planner, Michelle Ocampo at the time, sent an RFP to hotels in those areas outlining our conference and sleeping needs. We received several bids, but many were either prohibitively expensive or not ideally located. Our second round of RFP included the TradeWinds Island Resort in St. Pete Beach. I was familiar with TradeWinds from their hosting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) conference, which is slightly larger than VIS. Fortunately, the TradeWinds came back with a competitive bid, leaving us to choose between two Orlando venues and St. Pete Beach.

Deciding on a location was far from straightforward. We weighed a variety of factors, including access to airports, hotel room costs, the availability of conference space, food and beverage (F&B) minimums imposed by venues, proximity to local restaurants, and the overall appeal of the location. In the end, the TradeWinds won our vote. While it isn’t perfect, it checks most of the critical boxes: the airport isn’t ideally close but is accessible; the room rates, though not cheap, are reasonable; the conference space is provided “free” (with the hotel recuperating costs elsewhere); the F&B minimums are within our expected expenses; and the location offers some of the best activities we’ve had at a VIS conference in a long time.

We capped off the decision with a site visit between me, the program chairs (Josh Levine and Gautam Chaudhary at the time), and Michelle. Everything checked out, and after a lot of approvals, paperwork, negotiation, and waiting, we had a contract!

As we continue to plan and refine the details for VIS 2024, I’m filled with anticipation. Getting the community together in person feels more significant now than ever. The path to getting here has been challenging, but I believe that our site choice will provide a memorable and meaningful experience for all attendees.

Stay tuned for more as we get closer to the conference—I can’t wait to see you all in Florida!