Alternate AC Reps should always be allowed to attend the AC meeting

[hober]

§3.2.4. Advisory Committee Meetings contains the following text:

Each Member organization should send one representative to each Advisory Committee Meeting. In exceptional circumstances (e.g., during a period of transition between representatives from an organization), the meeting Chair may allow a Member organization to send two representatives to a meeting.

This text predates the creation of Alternate AC reps, which are defined in §3.2.2. Participation in the Advisory Committee.

The quoted paragraph above currently only allows Member organizations to send two reps to an AC meeting "in exceptional circumstances." Now that Alternate AC reps are a regular, ordinary thing, I suspect we should, in general, allow Member organizations to send both their AC rep and their alternate, and not only "in exceptional circumstances."

[chaals]

The core counter-argument to this proposal is cost. Members are paying for a fully-catered two-day meeting each year, that only some members are in practice able to attend. Doubling the cost for those who can send two people relatively easily raises real questions. For members in North America, or Western Europe, there are a lot of benefits. Travel from Australia to almost anywhere is extremely time-consuming and expensive. Japan and China are far, most of the rest of the world is extremely far.

[chaals]

A second counter-argument revolves around equity of access. The same thing that makes in-person meetings valuable means being able to send two people provides "more equity of access", but only to those who can do it.

Against this, of course, the ability to provide twice as much face-to-face interaction directly increases the value of the meeting to others, which is why I think it's a secondary argument - and definitely not one that conclusively demolishes the case @hober makes (I don't think the first argument above does so either).

[hober]

@chaals wrote:

The core counter-argument to this proposal is cost. [All] Members are paying for a fully-catered two-day meeting each year, that only some members are in practice able to attend. Doubling the cost for those who can send two people relatively easily raises real questions.

I think this is a great point. Perhaps there should be a registration fee for additional AC meeting attendees, to help offset this?

A second counter-argument revolves around equity of access. The same thing that makes in-person meetings valuable means being able to send two people provides "more equity of access", but only to those who can do it.

There’s already inequity of access, because some members already send multiple people. Chairs are also invited to the AC meeting, as are AB, BoD, and TAG participants. So, member companies currently desiring to increase their access to the AC meetings can do so by increasing their participation in the consortium’s other activities. That seems okay to me, to a point anyway.

[hober]

I wrote:

There’s already inequity of access, because some members already send multiple people. Chairs are also invited to the AC meeting, as are AB, BoD, and TAG participants.

To provide a concrete example, my own employer had three employees attend AC2024 Hiroshima—we had one attendee on the AB, one attendee on the BoD, and me (our AC rep, but also on the TAG at the time).

[cwilso]

The incremental cost (to other members) of additional AC reps attending seems awfully minimal, as we're primarily talking about the spring AC meeting catering, and a very small possible pressure on the required room size at TPAC. I'm in favor of making this change.

Also, I would refute the statement that this particularly benefits those in North America; our past three spring AC meetings have been in Japan and Europe. Of our past six AC meetings (including TPAC), only two of them have been in North America (33%). Given that >50% of our members are North-America based, that hardly seems out of line. I do agree with your statement that Australia, sadly, is far away. :)