Friday, February 20, 2009

proceeding to a new type of conference....

in the last few years, several conference organisation cttes have experimented with
the idea of Shadow programme cttes - these serve to trai nup new researchers in the process, as well as potentially acting as an error checker for the main conference and providing the paper authors with copious amounts more feedback - sigcomm and conext have both done this a few times...

now here are two proposals for the next step.

1. Run complete shadow conferences as well - instead of just having 1 "main" "real" PC and the shadow PCs just being training ground, let the shadow pcs selerct their actual top n papers and (at the same time in the same place in parallel tracks) have a full set (2, 3 - as many as you like) of conferences - like parallel worlds if you like - clearly if the various PCs select overlapping sets of papers, then they merge for those presentations...

2. two many people invest far too much importance in CS conferences - nowadays grad students in the US think their academic career is over if they don't get their work in SIGCOMM or SOSP, and practically never submit work to Transactions on Networks or TOCS despite those being easier to get into and just as weighty.

The solution is to STOP PRINTING conference proceedings - just have presentations only



3. Even more radical proposal - have a final shadow PC that accepts "all the resr of submissions that weren't accepted by any other PCs, and allow all the authors to present their papers in the "shadow of shadows" parallel track...

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