[sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

[Jennifer Rexford]

Larry,

Hi, good question.  The way this works now is that each conference/workshop
decides whether to print a proceedings, and budgets the costs; they can
decide whether to print just enough for the conference attendees (and some
extra, e.g., for libraries, sale, etc.) or to mail to the SIG membership.
The key issue is that each event breaks even (and budgets a small
contingency to protect against uncertainty), and that we use SIG membership
dues to pay for printing and mailing CCR; all members also get a copy of the
main SIGCOMM proceedings.  A number of years ago, we used to send *all*
proceedings to *all* members, at a cost that made us lose money on each
member -- forcing us to use conference revenues to subsidize membership
benefits.  That was fine, for a while...

Then, as the number of conferences and workshops started to grow in the past
five or six years, this was getting increasingly untenable, from a cost
perspective. Plus, with papers increasingly available online (for free,
because of a deal the SIG negotiated with ACM), mailing all proceedings to
all members didn't seem like the best use of funds.  We looked at increasing
the membership dues to avoid losing money on a per member basis (and making
it up in volume!), but the increase struck us as too large, and some
conference proceedings just wouldn't be of interest to some members.  And,
we looked at having two classes of memberships -- with and without
conference/workshop proceedings -- but the cost of printing a smaller run of
each proceeding was higher on a per-proceeding basis, which almost
completely offset the benefit.  (Joe, feel free to chime in -- I recall your
doing a bunch of this analysis a number of years ago.)

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of explaining why things work the way
they do now, where each conference/workshop budgets the cost for printing
its own proceedings, and mailing it (if they choose to mail it).  The bottom
line is that SIG doesn't really have much of a revenue stream: membership
dues cover member benefits, and conferences/workshops generally break even,
with the SIG covering loses when they happen and keeping profits (when they
occur) in the bank to help when an event loses money, and occassionally to
fund other things (like funding student travel grants, or printing and
mailing the first couple of HotNets proceedings).  That is, the decision to
print the first couple of HotNets proceedings in CCR was done as a way to
help bootstrap the new event, on the SIG's nickel rather than the workshop
budget.  We use surpluses to support new events (when they are at their most
critical time), support students, and protect against future losses (to
allow events we sponsor to take some risk).

-- Jen

-----Original Message-----
From: sigcomm-bounces at postel.org [mailto:sigcomm-bounces at postel.org] On
Behalf Of Larry Peterson
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 4:30 AM
To: Joe Touch
Cc: sigcomm at postel.org
Subject: Re: [sigcomm] attendance policies for SIGCOMM-affiliated events

This seems pretty important. I would be thrilled to see the
proceedings published, augmented with notes about the discussion.
This happened for HotNets-I. I'm pretty sure Hotnets-II papers
were published in CCR, but I don't recall if there were any
meeting notes. I'm pretty sure the HotNets-III papers were not
published.

My understanding is that this is an issue of budgets, and the
extent to which SIGCOMM can help offset CCR costs. Perhaps
others that know more about budgets/costs can comment.

Larry

On Oct 26, 2005, at 1:04 PM, Joe Touch wrote:

> Larry Peterson wrote:
>
>> Joe, I disagree that it's a private meeting. The CFP is published
>> widely, anyone can submit, and the these papers are the primary
>> factor in deciding who can attend.
>>
>
> Private meeting. Public proceedings, public call. We may be splitting
> hairs here, but private parties are often publicly known of a- 
> priori and
> publicly reported post-facto.

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