[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Greg Minshall]

my thoughts:

a)  one of SIGCOMM's roles is to support the networking research community. 
 (we do that, for example, by providing access to SIGCOMM publications in 
the ACM Digital Library free of charge).  the "networking research 
community" overlaps with SIGCOMM membership.

b)  closed, small, workshops are very important for the research community. 
 (i've seen "small" up to 60 or so people.)

(therefore, I support SIGCOMM supporting some by-invitation-only workshops.)

c)  in terms of who gets invited, i'd leave it up to the organizing 
committee, but *my* default would be: authors of accepted papers (ambiguity 
of primary or all secondary); PC; primary authors of rejected papers, 
assuming the rejected paper had a clue; other invitees (this last class to 
make up < 10 % of the total attendees).  (somebody mentioned "all the 
students you can squeeze in", which I reject:  hopefully, students will be 
authors of papers.)

cheers, Greg

p.s., years ago Scott Brim of Cisco was ruminating about the IETF, now 
versus then, and said something like, "before, we tried to do what was 
good, and now, we try to do what is 'right'; the latter is much harder."