To avoid complex communications between different countries and currency exchange fees, we wish to manage inscriptions and the whole budget locally. The budget estimates below are rounded, getting into more precise figures wouldn't be realistic. Fares in this document are based on to-day's costs. They are given all taxes included (VAT).
Inscriptions will be managed by the 'Adermip' a non-profit public organization, very professional, and with a very low management cost: 5% of the inscription fees before VAT. This organization has managed a large number of scientific meetings in the Toulouse area for more than 15 years. In addition, this organization may be non taxable (VAT) from January 2001, allowing participants to save 20% on inscription fees. Public sponsorship must be managed by the university, with a management cost of 11% + VAT, or by the CNRS, with a management cost of 5% (supposed to decrease soon). The cheapest/ most efficient solution will be selected.
Our general philosophy is to have balanced inputs and expenses for each 'module': the main conference, and each of the workshops and tutorials. Therefore, inscription fees will be estimated on this basis.
The following estimates are based on 400 paying participants for the input and about 500 participants for the expenses (since we'll have to plan more than just the inscriptions recieved 1 or 2 months before the meeting), to be in a very pessimistic case. Recent meetings (Montreal and Maryland, in particular) have had much more participants, 650 to 700, so we can expect a much higher participation than 400. Expenses are based here on a 3 day main conference. If the conference is longer, fees may be sligthly higher, but not more than 100 to 200 F. Toulouse being a relatively cheap area, inscription fees and expenses are moderate.
Inscriptions fees in this estimate are evaluated at 1000 F (150 Euros), this is an average between different fees that we will establish, e.g. student and regular fares, early and late inscriptions. Also, if we have sufficient funding, we may offer free or highly discounted inscription fees to a few students or colleagues from `emerging' countries, with justification. This policy needs to be discussed with the ACL-EACL boards, so far these are just suggestions of inscription fee policies we've seen around.
Note that 1000F is a low inscription fee since, as a comparison, the ACL fee for this year meeting in Maryland is about 1500 F (we don't mean this was expensive). If Adermip is non-taxable in 2001, then fees can decrease down to 800F.
This section is organized as follows: we first evalute sponsorship, then propose a budget with low inscription fees and a small profit. Next, we propose an extension to this budget with slightly higher inscription fees (+400F) and therefore a higher profit for ACL-EACL. The ACL-EACL executive committee is invited to indicate his preference. There is obviously a trade-off between the fees and the number of participants: beyond a certain threshold, higher fees will discourage people to come, in spite of the low accomodation and travelling costs.