[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Greg Minshall]

thoughts:

1.  i was also a happy WWOS attendee.

2.  i think duration of the limited attendance is not the issue.  a good, 
small conference, could be limited attendance for years.  in Jen's 4 November 
note, i would delete ", particularly in the first year or two".

3.  some of what we do, we do for our members.  else of what we do, we do for 
the "network research community at large".  for example, SIGCOMM publications 
are available to all through the ACM digital library (rather than just 
available to SIGCOMM members).

4.  a limited conference may "further research only for the attendees".  but, 
that seems unlikely.  it will hopefully (if it is any good) further the field 
of network research.  thus, it will be directly of benefit to the set of 
attendees, and indirectly of benefit to the rest of us.  presumably, ideas, 
even papers, from the workshop, eventually make it to SIGCOMM, or are shot 
down.

5.  i think "cliquishness" for attendance is similar to cliquishness for paper 
acceptance.  we try hard to avoid the appearance and we also try (hard?) to 
avoid the reality (if we don't try *hard* to avoid the reality, it is because 
we don't believe it exists, i think).

6.  i think SIGCOMM can pass to the steering committee can pass to the program 
chairs/PC the responsibility for selecting the attendees in those cases where 
that seems appropriate.

7.  the default for the very few limited attendee workshops would probably be 
authors, PC, co-authors, plus some others.  one argument seems to be whether 
"some others" is FCFS or "selected conversation invokers".  i think *this* 
particular delta should be up to the steering committee/chairs/PC.

8.  i think the workshop report should include a list of attendees, as well as accepted papers, etc.  could be online.  i think Roch's point that a workshop closed for a number of years will end up being viewed as being cliquish is not any truer than the perception after a number of years that paper acceptance at SIGCOMM is cliquish, and is a reason to try to avoid cliquishness, and avoid the perception of cliquishness, but not a reason to avoid accepting good papers to SIGCOMM.

9.  i think "fairness" *is* orthogonal to "good science".  again, we accept papers based on quality, not based on some concept of "fairness" that would require a toss of a coin, etc.

interesting the bifurcation amongst us "community members".  there seem to be side A and side B, and not much in between!  i guess this means there is exactly one point on which we disagree (perhaps "transient" versus "possibly permanent").

Greg