Question: Recently I was in an ACM supported conference.
During the banquet, the conference organizers told us about the future and past of the conference. They told us that during the 2010 edition of the conference there was a loss of 5000$.

They showed us the budget of the previous conference where we could see that there were 8000$ (10% of the budget if I remember correctly) given to ACM. Maybe because I am not yet fully in the field (I am starting my PhD in september 2011), I was the only one to ask what was this money given for. The answer I got was really disappointing, apparently the main contributions of the ACM was to print the proceedings and to give advice so the next year there would not be such a loss (apparently the advice given was to raise the entry fees). 

I was really surprised, since in order to read the proceedings your university has to pay a subscription to ACM (correct me if I am wrong), I thought ACM (is it the same for IEEE?) had to pay to support the conference.

So my questions are:

1. What does ACM really bring to a conference?
2. Have you heard of other conferences where this is the case?

*Related Blog posts:*
[Freedom to Thinker](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dwallach/tinkering-ieee-and-acm-copyright-policies) and [Matt Blaze's post](http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs), apparently the question was already asked.

Answer: 
One thing ACM brings to a conference is name recognition: if I see that a conference is ACM-sponsored, even if it's one that I haven't heard of before, I can be confident that it's reasonably high quality and well organized, rather than being one of those scam conferences that accepts everything and profits off the registration fees. (I'm less sure of that with IEEE after the [Schlangemann](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Schlangemann) scandal.) Of course, there are also good conferences that are not sponsored by these societies. And I wouldn't want to rely on this halo effect for making decisions about tenure or anything important like that — better to solicit opinions from people who know that area better — but it can be useful when deciding where to send a paper.
I was involved in the organization of the [Fourth International Symposium on Combinatorial Search](http://www.socs11.org) and I am currently involved in the [next](http://www.socs12.org) one. Other than that, I am an active reviewer of the [ACM Computing Reviews](http://www.reviews.com), so I hope I can help a little bit. 

First of all, conferences when providing a good standard of services are not cheap at all. However, there are a number of societies (NSF for example) and organizations/companies that do usually support the conference. As opposite to Peter Shor, I do not think that most conferences try to make money off of the conference (in general) but not to lose it. However, it seems to me that ACM/IEEE conferences are now going in the wrong direction ---see the abovementioned [link](https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dwallach/tinkering-ieee-and-acm-copyright-policies)

As for the proceedings, take the case of the [AAAI](http://www.aaai.org), just because I know it better. We paid about 3,000 US$ for getting the proceedings managed by this association. In exchange, the proceedings were available during the conference over the net (so that there was no need to distribute any separate CD/USB pendrive) and they are now widely available to the general public ---to access the proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Combinatorial Search follow this [link](http://www.aaai.org/Library/SOCS/socs11contents.php) while the proceedings of the previous edition are available [here](http://www.aaai.org/Library/SOCS/socs10contents.php).

So regarding the second question, the answer is no. And it is definitely important to make here a clear statement: that is not the only way to manage proceedings ---i.e., to ask the conference chairs to pay, to particular readers to pay and to organizations/universities to pay while retaining the copyright of the papers.

As for the first one, it seems to me that these societies (as Peter Shor said before) try to make money off of the conference they sponsor. The service they supposedly provide is that they overlook the conference and guarantee a high service level, but I am pretty sure that you all know conferences (particularly sponsored by IEEE) which are far from being good (e.g., a high number of submissions are accepted and the general quality is rather low). As a matter of fact, there are a number of Call for Papers that I do immediately send to my Trash folder without even reading ...