[iqster]

As someone who has published papers in ACM and IEEE conferences, I have had similar feelings to that in the article.

The thing is ... conferences (the unpaid Program Committees) are required for curation. There are too many papers published ... by attending and reading papers from top conferences, I can keep things sane. ACM and IEEE support the conferences by underwriting them. Consider a conference like SOSP ... last time I was there, I think there were 500+ academics in attendance. Despite corporate sponsors, there just isn't enough upfront cash (participant registration fees come in AFTER the venue is booked, for example) I can't see a way for academics to self-organize at this scale.

[quag]

And yet, linux.conf.au managed to self-organize at this scale with a completely different set of organizers each year.

[gritzko]

FOSDEM is also a good example of how things could be organized.