On International Inclusion at Virtual Conferences: A Response to SIGPLAN

On December 22, 2021, the three of us and 215 cosigners (as of this writing) sent an open letter to the organizers of POPL 2021 and SIGPLAN leadership, asking them to make POPL accessible to the entire world and to commit to doing the same in future virtual SIGPLAN conferences. SIGPLAN and POPL recently responded to our letter in a blog post.

As organizers of the original petition we think it is important that we respond to the SIGPLAN blog post.

We want to start by saying that we believe that everyone involved was well intentioned and doing their very best under very difficult circumstances. We also want to say that we are very pleased that in response to the open letter, SIGPLAN has publicly committed to “offer people from all time zones approximately equal opportunity to engage” in future virtual conferences.

The reason we’re writing is simple. The POPL’21 organizers made the synchronous component of the conference inaccessible to a significant fraction of the global community. We care about this and SIGPLAN’s response to it because each sets an important precedent.

The SIGPLAN response is threefold, arguing that: the committee are well-intentioned, the committee have made other positive innovations, and that the synchronous schedule is insignificant. The response doesn’t acknowledge that an inherently exclusive synchronous program is at odds with SIGPLAN’s stated goals of inclusivity.

We have expressed empathy with the organizers and have not suggested that they had anything but the best of intentions. We previously called out their innovative exploration of asynchronous scheduling as a positive step. However, neither are germane to the discussion, so it is puzzling to see so much of the response above dedicated to these points. Raising them distracts from the substantive concern (inclusion), makes the discussion unnecessarily personal, and unfortunately carries an inference that the community’s raising of the concrete concerns was an attack on the committee’s motives or a suggestion that their asynchronous experiment was a problem. Neither is the case.

The argument that POPL’21’s synchronous schedule is ‘small’ and thus somehow insignificant is problematic at multiple levels. In our letter, we described the synchronous element as ‘core’, which speaks to its significance, not its size. It is disingenuous to suggest that the POPL’21 synchronous program is insignificant. If it were, then of course it could have been removed from the program, all the more so given the committee’s desire to explore asynchronous interactions and the substantial organizational effort in running it. It could also have been rescheduled to a different time zone as a demonstration of how insignificant it was. Of course neither were tenable precisely because the synchronous schedule is absolutely core to POPL. As it transpired, the distress generated by the failure of the software platform during the first day of the POPL’21 synchronous program emphatically makes this point — the synchronous program was a central, critical, element of POPL’21, and it was, by design, exclusive. This is profoundly problematic.

The suggestion in the letter above that the community should ‘judge for themselves’ how well an exclusive event works is equality problematic as it promulgates and deepens a survivorship bias already deeply entrenched in SIGPLAN engagement and attendance.

There is no shame in making a mistake, particularly when organizing an international event in the context of a pandemic. The problem we’re facing appears to be a deep unwillingness to acknowledge that making the heart of the POPL’21 program exclusive was an error. This unwillingness to own the problem and learn from it is at odds with SIGPLAN’s stated intention to ‘educate ourselves’ with respect to inclusion and to make a ‘better place’.

This is disheartening, to say the least.

Steve Blackburn

Jonathan Aldrich

Alex Potanin