[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Joe Touch]

Nick Feamster wrote:
...
> For example, one point in the solution space (which I am not necessarily
> advocating) might be:
> 	- Some form of limited attendance policy (FCFS, authors only, etc.)
> 	- Live webcast of workshop
> 	- 20-minute talks, 7 minutes of questions from people present in
> 	  the room, 3 minutes of "mailbag" questions by email
> 	- Scribes to take notes of Q&A, to be published at the end of
> 	  the workshop (digitally, if funds are limited).  Volunteering
> 	  to scribe could, of course, be one way to get invited. 
> 
> Those people who send thoughtful questions by email might raise the
> attention of the workshop organizers for the next year.  
> 
> Feel free to rip this apart; I am merely suggesting that there may be a
> way to use technology to strike the right balance between limited
> attendance, meritocracy, and openness.  We are, after all, a
> communications society. 

Why do we need a balance? The reasons to have limited attendance are:

	a) limited space
		that happens, but is generally not the typical issue
		it's easy enough to get larger venues for future years

	b) desire to limit the size of the group discussing the work
		opening the meeting up to web input doesn't help this
		it's been tried at other venues, notably the IETF, where
		questions often came in too late to be useful

	c) desire to limit the content of the group discussing the work
		this is, I believe, the hidden intent behind some of the
		nature of 'invitations'; this is diametrically opposed
		to the notion of a conference providing a public venue

I.e., conferences and workshops - public venues for research - should be
OPEN.

Special meetings - private venues for promoting research or policy - can
be invitation-based, but they're a completely different animal, and
there are very few (9/11, Internet attacks, etc.) and far between.

Greg said:
> 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.

IMO, (b) has its place for a research organization. The ACM isn't one,
and isn't here to promote research.

Joe


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