[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Roch Guerin]

Larry,

This is as good a proposal as we can get, when it comes to outlining 
invitation policies for closed venues.

On the other hand, I think that one of the key issue we have been 
debating is the extent to which closed venues, that are and remain 
closed by design, are of benefits to the whole community at large.

For any venue, you have so called "direct" benefits that are in a form 
that is accessible by all, such as proceedings or recording of the 
sessions that are made available for public viewing.  These are tangible 
items that can be assessed relatively easily.

Then you have what I would call "indirect" benefits that are essentially 
measuring the subsequent impact the venue has in terms of promoting a 
new research agenda or initiating discussions and follow-on work on 
various problems.  In the case of open venues, one can make the case 
that everyone has access to these benefits if they choose to 
participate.  The situation is different for closed venues, which argue 
that a small, selected audience is needed in order to enable the kind of 
interactions that produce such outcomes.  This is I believe the source 
of the debate, as for closed venues the only clear/immediate 
beneficiaries are the attendees and not necessarily the community at 
large.   Arguing that this is the case is where things start being more 
in the realm of opinions than hard evidences, and for which, as Greg 
articulated, there seems to be two different view points.

I know that personally I am not convinced that a venue that persists as 
a closed event represents a good "return on investment" of SIG resources 
in terms of offering sustained benefits to the entire community.  This 
does not mean that such a venue wont be producing good results, but just 
that over time there is a law of diminishing return in terms of the the 
spill-over of these benefits to the rest of the community.  I would 
rather apply SIG resources to foster initiatives in new directions 
(again, these can be closed initially in order to help things get 
started) and support venues that ultimately open-up to let the community 
directly decide how to best derive benefits from those venues.

Roch


>In the interest of putting forward a tangible proposal that we can
>discuss, I propose a transparent policy that roughly matches past
>practice:
>
>   o the PC and SC
>   o one author per paper
>   o as many students as we have scholarships for (preferring
>     co-authors of accepted papers and then co-authors of
>     submitted papers)
>   o sponsor representatives (e.g., from NSF)
>
>This gets us to roughly 80-90%. Then, at the Chair/PC's discretion:
>
>   o as many second authors or authors of rejected papers as we can
>     fit, perhaps with a slight bias for students/faculty at the hosting
>     site.
>
>Logistically, the invitation list probably needs to be finalized
>by the chairs (as people accept or decline), but it seems reasonable
>to have the PC put forward a list of "invite if room" people based
>on the discussion during the PC meeting. (I should probably add at
>this point that all HotNets have had co-chairs, meaning that there's
>already some checks-and-balances built into the system.)
>
>One final point. I know much of this discussion is about perception
>as much as reality. Here's a small data-point of reality. In looking
>at the registration list for 3 of the first 4 HotNets (all I have at
>the moment), I count a total of 181 attendees and 145 unique  
>individuals.
>
>Larry
>