Along with the "everybody pays" policy, I think this post does a good job of highlighting how hard it really is to put together a conference like this. Not only

Along with the "everybody pays" policy, I think this post does a good job of highlighting how hard it really is to put together a conference like this. Not only are the organizers thinking about this year's conference, they're already working on the next one, on top of everything else these people do (which is a lot). $50k in financial aid divided by the average revenue per person ($300), puts you at around 166 people receiving some form of aid (likely less as some receive airfare/hotel as well). Just dealing with 166 different people, as a volunteer financial aid team, is hard. From what I hear, the financial aid people (person?) are very good to deal with, and they are very fair. Last fall, the program committee was meeting via IRC for ~1.5 hours a night, several nights a week, for what seemed like forever. There were something like 275 talks submitted, and not only did everyone read nearly all of the talks before the meeting, we then spent time debating and voting on them as a group. Then we cut the list down, re-organized, and did it all again, and kept meeting until the final group was selected. While the big time organizers, the PC chair and conference chair, were busy with all of the other crazy stuff, they were still there in these selection meetings. They could have been dealing with tasks with $50,000 price tags on them, but probably the most important part of the whole thing is the talks, so they sacrificed more of their personal time to join the talk selection group to make sure we were putting together the best conference we could.