Relevant elements concerning CPDP funding
1. CPDP is a not-for-profit conference. All sponsorship goes into paying the costs of the conference and towards public goods (art exhibitions, public debates and sponsoring PhD students and supporting activists’ participation). The CPDP (financial) administration is conducted through a Belgian non-profit organisation and is accountable under Belgian law: Privacy Salon. Apart from Belgian rules for non-profit organisations the Scientific Committee oversees the financial statements of CPDP.
2. CPDP is an organising partner of the annual NGO event, Privacy Camp. This event provides civil society actors the space to engage with other individuals and institutions and not-for-profit organisations.
3. CPDP does not pay speakers a fee. Yet it does cover the travel expenses of PhD students and speakers who are not in a financial position to do so, such as NGO representatives.
4. To maintain the financial integrity of CPDP, it concentrates on diversification. There are three main sources of financial contributions: i) panel fees of conference and event partners, ii) participants’ fees (which remains remarkably low for civil society representatives and students), and iii) sponsorship and grants.
The role of the CPDP scientific committee
The CPDP scientific committee oversees the organizing and programming committee and monitors its decision-making. The scientific committee is comprised of academics who meet face to face annually and are engaged throughout the whole CPDP organizing cycle. The accountability of the organizing committee is demonstrated before the scientific committee regarding sponsorship channels and when questions arise regarding individual sponsoring entities.
Maintaining the integrity of CPDP in the future
The CPDP organizers acknowledge that the legal, political and social significance of privacy and data protection requires constant vigilance and commitment to maintain CPDP’s position as an accessible and meaningful platform for dialogue. The challenges that arise, as highlighted by this note, are ever-present, but the accountability mechanisms seek to secure the integrity of CPDP now and in the future. From 2016 on, CPDP will set up a ‘Integrity Suggestion Box’ (via the website), the content of which will be on the agenda of the annual CPDP scientific committee board meeting.
CPDP: a platform for voices on privacy and data protection
CPDP is a conference about privacy and data protection. It offers a forum where different voices are heard and where positions are compared debated, approached or differentiated.
CPDP is a non-profit platform originally founded in 2007 by research groups from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Namur and Tilburg University. The platform was joined in the following years by the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique and the Fraunhofer Institut für System und Innovationsforschung and has now after a decade grown into a platform carried by 20 academic centers of excellence from the EU, the US and beyond.. As a world-leading multidisciplinary conference CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic and technological development in privacy and data protection. Within an atmosphere of independence and mutual respect, CPDP gathers academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, industry and civil society from all over the world in Brussels, offering them an arena to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world.
CPDP has a variety of contributing formats, which translate into partners, sponsors and supporters. Partners organise panels and pay a panel contribution to compensate for the fact that panellists do not have to pay registration fee. There are two types of partners: (1) ‘Conference Partners’ is a format developed for academic centres of excellence that organise a panel at CPDP and are also involved in scientific activities such as reviewing the call for papers; (2) ‘Event Partners’ is a format for other public and private institutions and research projects that organise panels at CPDP; Sponsors contribute a certain sum of money in exchange for visibility. Some sponsors are also involved in organising panels others only have one or more speakers at the conference. There are three main levels of sponsorship : ‘Platinum, Premier and Event Sponsors’; Finally ‘Moral Supporters’ and ‘Media Supporters’ do not contribute financially or organise panels but provide moral support and/or press coverage to the conference.
This note clarifies how CPDP looks at the role of funding and makes use of funding. These are the CPDP criteria regarding funding:
1. CPDP accepts sponsorship from all entities, who wish to endorse the objectives of the conference, however, the organizers reserve the right to decline sponsorship offered by sponsors whose main activities are incompatible with the spirit and aims of the conference or have the effect that certain stakeholders do not want to be involved in the conference anymore.
2. Sponsorship of CPDP does not give public or private institutions any influence over the entire programme of CPDP. Suggestions and ideas are considered by the programme committee, which makes the final decision. Panels that are set up by partners are identified as such in the programme. From 2016 on the name of individual speakers who receive sponsoring, and the identity of the sponsor, who organise panels will also be made publicly available. A quality check in terms of multidisciplinarity, originality, geographical spread and gender equality is carried out by the programming committee. These requirements are also communicated to panel organisers beforehand. Although the programming committee is open to suggestions of the partner or sponsor the committee adds a member of the CPDP scientific committee or a person with specific expertise in the subject matter of the panel to each panel (apart from the panels organised by conference partners) either as a moderator or chair. All responsibility for unbalanced panels is for the programming committee who is accountable to the CPDP scientific committee.
3. The CPDP sponsorship packages are public (on the website). The most substantive (platinum) covers 25.000 euro. No sponsorship representing altogether more than 7,5 % of the total cost of the conference is allowed. The total funding by private enterprises will not be more than 49% of the total costs of the conference.