SIGCOMM Blog

Over the past year, the SIGCOMM Executive Committee (EC) has spent a bit of time discussing the SIGCOMM conference. We often hear that the conference is not sufficiently accepting of work that comes from outside of a particular group, or on submissions outside of currently-favored topics.

We'd like to hear from the SIGCOMM community on whether this is a real problem, and if so the extent to which it is a problem. If there is a problem, what suggestions do people have as to how it might be addressed?

Posted by Mark Crovella at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

For highly-selective conferences such as SIGCOMM, it is particularly important to have a review process that is seen as having deep technical expertise across the conference topic areas, fair, balanced and free of conflicts of interest. The composition of the technical program committee plays a crucial role. In its role as the steering committee, the EC developed statements of the sort of goals we hold out for composition of the technical program committee and how PC chair-authored papers should be handled during review.

We formulated these as new guidelines. They're available here and here. The new guidelines don't tie the hands of PC chairs in terms of who is invited to the PC; rather they add an advisory step in the process.

We consider these works-in-progress; we're trying them out with the 2009 conference. We're interested in what SIGCOMM members and conference attendees think about these policies.

Posted by Mark Crovella at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

The SIGCOMM blog is a forum for discussion of topics and issues of concern to the SIGCOMM community.

Posted by Mark Crovella at 02:32 PM | Permalink