Q3: Large Conferences

From Health of Conferences Committee

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?

OOPSLA

workshop co-located at conferences

Workshops have been always an impportant part of OOPSLA. For the last 4 years OOPSLA has been co-located with other conferences.

stand-alone workshops

We didn't call them Workshops but we have tracks such as the Educators' and Doctoral Symposia that are stand alone. For few years OOPSLA sponsored mid-year series of Workshop as a separate meetings from OOPSLA but achieved moderate success and the idea died when its champion stepped down.

panels

Always as part of the core OOPSLA conference

crazy idea sessions

Last year we introduced the Lightning Talks (strictly 5 minutes talks for any idea an author would like to share with the audience). It is too early to assess its success, but the concept was borrowed from other conferences where such talks were a great success.

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?

I believe OOPSLA was instrumental in introducing many of such venues that other conference adopted and such venues proved very valuable for the community. OOPSLA publishes a companion to the proceedings which includes the workshops conclusion, panels, etc. Also, Onward! presentations have been published in separate publications.

SIGCSE

stand-alone workshops

in computer science education, CCSC and other groups sponsor quite a number of regional conferences. SIGCSE is in cooperation with these. Since these have a strong following, SIGCSE has not seen any reason to try to duplicate them.

panels

each conference has a range of panels on new or emerging ideas.

crazy idea sessions

The SIGCSE Symposium provides an opportunity for "Special Sessions" and Birds-of-a-Feather than can promote a range of "crazy" ideas.

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?

The SIGCSE Bulletin and conferences are the primary mechanisms for communication within the computer science education community -- especially at the college level. We have tried to expand this to other levels (with special emphasis on two-year colleges and high schools), within our resources. For example, we have had special conference rates for high school teachers.