acm sigcomm

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1. 2015 status

SIGCOMM preparation for 2015 is well on its way.  We had a joint meeting of the 2014 and 2015 org committees on 19 August 2014 to ensure that information flows between the organizers of both events.

2. Book projects

We are in the process of discussing a book project specifically on SDN (invited).  We will additionally accept other book proposals.

3. HotSDN proposal: ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) co-sponsored by the ONS Foundation and In-cooperation with USENIX.

A SICGOMM-sponsored SDN conference (coming out of the HotSDN workshop) is under preparation.  The name will be "ACM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR)".  ACM SIGOMM will take the lead, USENIX will be in-cooperation.  To maintain proximity to industry, this will be
colocated with and co-sponsored by the Open Networking Summit (ONS).

4. SIG-wide ethics guidelines

Some ethics issues were raised about some submitted papers in the past.  We need a process to deal with ethics issues.  IMC as our prime
venue for measurements has done a panel on ethics in research before (and could do another one).  And the IMC call for papers has specific
langauge on this matter.  We could have an "ethics cleared" checkbox on the paper submission.

We suggest a simple process: the PC chairs recognize issues and bump it up to the respective conference SC, which can then (after validation)
send it on to the EC, the EC then to the respective place in ACM.  Then it is up to the experts to deal with this.  We expect any such issues
to be highly specialized so that a general solution would be hard to find.  Hence, we only define a clear way of handling ethics issues.

5. ILB feedback

We collected feedback from our industry board now this has been in place for a while.  Two items were discuss in more breadth:

a) We should emphasise the importance of demo infrastructure for site selection and the conference organization because demos are
   important for both researchers and industry.  And many technical issues easily arise.  Venue selection criteria should cover
   demos explicitly and this could also go into the best practices document for conference organization.

b) An award on the impact on the practice of networking was suggested that should recognize if their work has impact on practice.  Such
   an award would be broader than a single paper, e.g., software  awards that recognize pieces of work that had impact on practice.
   It would recognize a body of work and often go to a set of persons. We basically support this idea and invite the ILB to come back with
   more details.

6. Feedback on childcare

Offering childcare at SIGCOMM was basically well received, albeit notthat much used as only a few people knew about this.  We will continue
with this and improve marketing for next year.

7. Feedback on mentoring program

We did a mentoring program in which newcomers at the N2women.  This mentoring was well received: people like the idea of meeting up before the conference to get to know each other, also across the newcomers. This could be generalized to all first time attendees.  To extend this to conferences at which don't do a specific workshop, the initial mentoring meet-up could be part of the reception.  Small signs on
nametags could indidate first-time attendees to ease finding each others (in additional to the interactions with the mentors).

8. Policy on conflicting sig events

We should have a clear policy for future conferences that attendence conflicts are avoided as much as possbile.  For example, PC meetings
should not conflict with regular conference or workshop programs. Implementation is up to the respective steering committees.

9. Discussion on quality standards for in coop

We have received inquiries about in some cases about the prerequisites for in-coop status to be granted.  We have now text on the web page with more details and templates for emails in case people ask.

10. Conference duration: should we go to 3.5 days?

We discussed if SIGCOMM should be longer than 3 days to allow as many papers as in 2014 but avoid making the days too long.  The suggestion is to stick to three days (lots of time commitment already), but to have shorter talks.  To keep the attention of the audience the talks, minimize the number of latecomers during sessions, and allow people enough time for interactions, posters and demos should at the end of the days.

11. Should all papers also have posters?

We discussed that, space permitting, we would like to give accepted full papers also a poster slot so that there is room for extended
discussion with the authors.

12. Awards transparency

The community should get to know which boards had been selecting the awardees.  In the past, we did not reveal this information, but we
intend to make the names of the committee members public after the selection process.  We will change this in the future, but we will
also inform the potential award committee members that their names will be known when they are asked to serve on the committee.

13. Open Access

We discussed open access for all our conference papers beyond the first year as currently offered by ACM Digital Library.  The current
open access fee is $700 per paper.  For the SIGCOMM conference, we have a special agreement that keeps the papers accessible already
now, but we will return to this for other SIGCOMM venues.