Community Feedback Session

Chair presentation (slides available online):

Major announcement: change in CCR policy, lifting the page limit for papers including data to aid replication.

SIGCOMM 2017 will be in Los Angeles. Applications for the 2018 location are open until September, with a preference for European submissions.

SIG had a loss this year, which was induced as the fund is in a healthy sate ($1M of discretionary spending available). Large number of travel grants awarded each year. Conferences can be sponsored by SIG.

There is student support available for national summits and summer schools as well.

New SIGCOMM communication channels on Facebook and Twitter.

Nomination committee for next SIG officers will be active this fall.

Feedback session:

-What are your thoughts on remote participation?

Mixed feelings, some of the presentations were highly polished. But the hallway feedback is lost, hard to replace the in-person experience for both the speaker and others interested.

Multi-room chats might help, but will be challenging to implement.

Remote Q&A enhanced the experience.

Suggestion: record and play video for all talks at a workshop to try this new format. Perhaps request 1-minute video with all submissions, all or most of which would be accepted.

Suggestion: allow for remote participation from outside the conference, not only from authors but also from the audience.

Suggestion: loyalty points for sponsors of the conference (example: Cisco, who sent personnel to Brazil).

Question: will page limit lifting be transferred to SIGCOMM as well?

Answer: we are usually reluctant to do changes to the well-run, long-standing conference, but if the CCR test goes well we will consider it.

Question: why is SIGCOMM held on the second or third week of August, quite inconvenient to some?

Answer: the specification has long been between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15. We encourage organizers to consider travel conditions and various scheduling conflicts. However this range can be flexible, and we can consider changes; a survey could be run to obtain people’s preferences, so a Fall date could be feasible.

Motivation for date: keeping clear of the teaching calendar and other important deadlines for our community. 

Commitment made to organize survey.

Question: has SIGCOMM considered rolling deadlines, which would greatly benefit graduate students?

Answer: three parts. There are other conferences in the area, and CCR is also a good alternative. There is PACM — Proceedings of the ACM, which constraints the deadline to a more journal-like format. Also, tradition for single-track, as SIGCOMM is the level-setting conference for this community. 
Chair: “I tried very hard but could not succeed, perhaps new chair can look into it.”

Citation can be changed to CCR for all related publications. 

Challenge: need to find a PC that is willing to work with a rolling deadline and multiple meetings.

Suggestion: papers accepted to CCR, to include a video like the remote presentations we saw today.

Question: some clarification on the number of submissions, and how many were “experience track” papers? They are not flagged in the proceedings.

Challenge: industry experience usually can not be replicated. But there is a risk of having plainly descriptive papers. 

Experience track is managed by TSC.

Question: can live streaming be added to the remote participation?

Answer: SIGCOMM has been live streamed for five years. 

Follow-up: quality could be better, should we consider a different provider?

Answer: we are not tied up to a provider for next year, so please send me (chair) any concerns you might have.