[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Jennifer Rexford]

Ken,

> 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? 

That's a great question, and we should make the policies more readily
available online from the main SIGCOMM Web site.  Let me give some 
context, and then explain how things work.  My warning in advance 
for a long note, in the interest of completeness.

First of all, there are two categories of SIGCOMM involvement, as
defined by the ACM: "sponsorship" (which implies financial involvement) 
and "in cooperation with" (which implies endorsement and technical
involvement).  For example, SIGCOMM is the sole sponsor of the main
SIGCOMM conference, HotNets, and IMC, and a co-sponsor of SenSys and
ANCS along with other SIGs (and some IEEE groups, in the case of
ANCS).  IMC is "in cooperation with USENIX".  CoNEXT is "in
cooperation with SIGCOMM."

Second, new events arise through grass-roots efforts.  A small group
of folks conceive of an event that fills a need and comes to SIGCOMM
asking for sponsorship, or co-sponsorship, or "in cooperation with"
status.  Then, the SIG executive committee reviews the proposal.  We
discuss, and weigh the need for such an event, the likelihood of
success, etc.  We also have a bunch of other criteria, like:

   - conference shouldn't overlap significantly in content with an
     existing SIGCOMM-sponsored conference

   - conference shouldn't overlap significantly in the dates with a
     related SIGCOMM conference (especially the annual SIGCOMM conference)

   - topic should be of interest to SIGCOMM members, and some SIGCOMM
     kinds of people would be on the program committee

   - quality is high enough that we'd want to be associated with it

   - conference makes the accepted papers freely available online

   - conference ideally would give a registration discount to ACM/SIGCOMM
     members, and have reasonable registration fees in general

   - we learn about the event early enough to advertise the CFP to our
     members

We've been trying to limit ourselves in the number of new sponsored
events so things don't become unmanageable, either logistically or
financially.  (For example, many SIGs, including SIGCOMM, lost a fair
amount of money in the year or two after the dot-com bust and 9/11,
making all SIGs concerned about controlling financial risk.  Plus, ACM 
has explicit requirements on how much money we need to maintain in reserve
as a fraction of our total conference and member-related expenses, which 
also limits the number of new events we can realistically take on.)

During the past five or six years, we've been taking on one (or at
most two) per year, in the interest of serving a growing community and
embracing new sub-specialties (e.g., measurement, sensornets, network
hardware, etc.). So, we've typically focused on "fat topics" rather
than narrow topics -- otherwise, we just couldn't reasonably contain
the number of events we're sponsoring.  For each sponsored event,
there is a steering committee that takes ownership for running the
event, putting together the budget, picking locations and venues,
picking the PC chairs, etc.  

Our goal has been to give these steering committees considerable
autonomy to give each event its own local flavor, with the SIG and ACM
providing guidance and assistance around budget, Web site, formatting
and printing the proceedings, registration, insurance, and stepping in
when extra help is needed.  With so many new events created in the past
few years, we're starting to realize the need to consider having some
SIG-level policies (e.g., around attendance policies, reviewing guidelines,
etc.).  During the public SIG business meeting at SIGCOMM'05 in August, 
we had a bunch of discussion about what kinds of SIG-level policies make 
sense for our SIG-sponsored events, to have some "SIG values" preserved 
while still erring on the side of steering committee autonomy whenever
possible.  Hence, the current discussion.

As an aside, the barrier for "in cooperation with" events is much
lower than for sponsorship, since the SIG takes no financial risk and
generally has much less work to do.  Normally, SIGCOMM would do "in
cooperation" where there would be mutual benefit. Meetings where we
expect substantial SIG participation - or want to promote that. The
meetings shouldn't overlap topically with an existing SIGCOMM-sponsored 
event, and the dates should not conflict either.  The event should
usually be sponsored by a fairly large organization as well -- ACM
(another SIG), IEEE, or IFIP to name a few -- and certainly by a
non-profit institution promoting research, rather than a commercial
entity or trade show.  Typically, these would be international events
(rather than small regional workshops).  We typically want to see the
current or proposed program committee members to get a sense of the
event, and for papers to be freely available online, and for the
SIG/ACM members to be eligible for whatever member discounts might be
made available for conference registration.  In general, we've been a
somewhat conservative in doing "in cooperation with" to avoid diluting or
compromising the meaning of "in cooperation with SIGCOMM," or creating
conflicts (in dates or topics) with existing SIGCOMM-sponsored events.

-- Jen, with SIG Chair hat on