[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Ken Calvert]

I second Craig's point:

> It seems to me that the issue is whether the benefit *to 
> the SIGCOMM community* of having a closed workshop is 
> large enough to exclude some parties who wish to attend 
> the workshop.

Most participants in the discussion so far have been 
organizers/attendees of such meetings; it's not surprising 
that they would support SIG sponsorship.  If any conclusions 
are going to be reached as a result of the current 
discussion, participation from a much wider cross-section of 
the SIGCOMM community is needed.

(In fact the question could be answered pretty 
straightforwardly by a poll, at least for meetings that have 
a history:  "Do you, as a SIGCOMM member, see enough value 
in [insert name of meeting] to justify SIG sponsorship, even 
though some members who want to attend will not be able 
to?")

Anyway, here's another data point.  I'm skeptical about 
limiting attendance for the sole purpose of "encouraging 
lively discussion".  As others have suggested, once you have 
too many participants to sit around one table, a particular 
size is neither necessary nor sufficient for good 
discussion, and having an arbitrary limit just risks the 
perception of exclusivity (which I believe has been 
acknowledged as an issue for SIGCOMM in the past).

I am somewhat more sympathetic with limiting numbers to 
reduce uncertainty in planning, or to meet venue constraints 
in some cases.

Finally, I think the more important transparency question is 
one level up: What is SIGCOMM's policy on sponsorship of 
meetings in general?  What criteria are used to decide 
whether SIGCOMM will sponsor a meeting?  Who makes the 
decision?  (A quick perusal of the web site found lots of 
advice for those wanting to organize meetings, but no 
policies, though I may have missed something.)  This part of 
the process should be as open and transparent as possible, 
to avoid any appearance of exclusivity.

[Full disclosure: I have (so far) not attended or submitted 
to any recent closed-attendance event.  Once, a looong time 
ago, my registration for SOSP was rejected because 
attendance was limited and the big company I worked for at 
that time already had its share of attendees.]

KC
-- 
Ken Calvert, Associate Professor      Lab for Advanced Networking
calvert at netlab.uky.edu                     University of Kentucky
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http://www.cs.uky.edu/~calvert/          Lexington, KY 40506-0495