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Health of Conferences Committee
- University of Wisconsin, ACM/SIGARCH & IEEE
- UC Irvine, IEEE
- USC/ISI, ACM/SIGPLAN
- Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, ACM/SIGGRAPH
Paolo Prinetto
- Politecnico di Torino, IEEE
Donna Baglio
- ACM Headquarters
Charge from ACM President David Patterson
The idea is to collect the best practices onto a web page so that conference organizers can see innovative ways to cope with the demands of paper submissions, refereeing, and presentations as the number of papers increase.
The hope is that organizers will either try good new ideas or at least avoid the mistakes of others.
Process
The committee--with the members listed above--was formed in December 2005. It "met" for several conference calls to create this Wiki whose initial version was released in XXX 2006. Key steps were formulating questions to ask ACM SIG chairs and IEEE XXXs, mailing out the questionnaires and compiling a short list of ideas to be recommended or avoided.
The goals are to the unearth actionable ideas and reveal failed ideas. It is NOT a goal to produce summary statistics, because we expect our audience is more interested in groups in similar situations (e.g., running very large conferences) than in some average.
Big conferences have more than one thousand attendees, small conferences less than 100, and medium conferences in the middle.
Top 10 Best Conference Ideas
We encourage an open debate on each of these ten ideas. In order to do this, follow the links below and click the + sign in the discussion area. You are then able to enter a discussion topic title and text. To reply to a specific discussion please put "Re" in front of the original topic title.
1. FOO
2. FOO
3. FOO
4. FOO
5. FOO
6. FOO
7. FOO
8. FOO
9. FOO
10. FOO
Complete Survey Results
Big conferences have more than one thousand attendees, small conferences less than 100, and medium conferences in the middle.
Question 1: REVIEWER LOAD
Has your community recently adopted new practices to deal with growing reviewer load, such as:
- tracking reviews of rejected papers from conference to conference as is done in journal reviewing
- increasing program committee size
- charging a review fee
- others?
For each practice you are using, what is your view of how well it is working within your community? Please comment on the merit of the other strategies as applies to your community.
Question 2: NON-INCREMENTAL
Has your community recently adopted new practices to promote non-incremental new ideas?
- big ideas sessions
- more papers
- shorter papers
- deemphasizing detailed evaluation
- others?
For each practice you are using, what is your view of how well it is working within your community? Please comment on the merit of the other strategies as applies to your community.
Question 3: PROGRAM COMMITTEES
Does your community practice:
- double blind submissions
- program committee submission restrictions
- rebuttals (author responses)
- large program committees
- program subcommittees
- others?
Do these practices seem to help or hurt promoting your field?
Question 4: WORKSHOPS, ETC.
Does your community provide venue for work not mature enough for your major conferences, such as:
- workshop co-located at conferences
- stand-alone workshops
- panels
- crazy idea sessions
On balance, are these other venues effect for advancing your field? What mechanisms, if any, do you use allow good papers from these venues to later achieve wider dissemination?
Question 5: CATCH-ALL
Are there other approaches your community has tried or abandoned that the rest of us can learn from?
Acknowledgments
The committee acknowledges the constructive advice of David A. Patterson, MORE NAMES HERE.
The committee acknowledges the excellent work of Mike Marty, Caitlin Scopel, MORE NAMES HERE.
References
Mark D. Hill, Some Advice for Program Committee Chairs Based on my ISCA 2005 Experience, April 2005, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/pcadvice2005.html.
Mark D. Hill, Interim Talk to the ACM Special Interest Group Governing Board, February 24, 2006, http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/acm_ieee_heath_conf_2006_02.ppt.
Kathyryn D. McKinley, Notes of Chairing Program Committees, May 2005, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/notes/PC.html.
David A. Patterson, President's Letter: The Health of Research Conferences and the Dearth of Big Idea Papers, Communications of the ACM, December 2004, pp. 23-24.
Please see documentation on customizing the interface + Health of Conferences Committee - and the User's Guide for usage and configuration help.
