Re: [Tccc] (changed topic): too many meetings

Joe Touch wrote:

The questions you should ask yourself are:

- when was the last time you declined a TPC invitation
because you felt the meeting was overcrowding the field?

- when was the last time you changed where you sent a paper
because you felt the meeting wasn't adding to the field
(vs. "the best place where the paper had the best shot")?

[Sankar, Ravi] I feel compelled to answer these comments as well. Personally, I have declined several TPC invitations in the past two years including WCNC etc due to work overload or chances of attending and participating is slim. I have tried to stay away from sending papers to conferences held in remote places where our chances of attending is not good due to prohibitive travel costs or unknown conference history. This may not be true for our younger faculty members or professionals and PhD students who still have to hustle and be active professionally and play the game of age old publish or perish commandment in order to get job or tenure and promotion. So our discussion has to be focused on them as to how to make it affordable to attend while still preserving quality and sanity by having manageable level of meetings.

- if you've ever been in a position to endorse a meeting
(as a TC chair, etc.), when was the last time you declined
a request with the reason of overcrowding?

(FWIW, for me the answer to all three is "within the last month") We can be selective!

We tried to deal with this very actively in TCGN (now TCHSN) as far back
as 1996 - 13 years ago. The response was generally to "let a thousand
flowers bloom, and the best will survive".
[Sankar, Ravi] Unfortunately I disagree with that and maybe I am in a minority here. This is analogous to VC's that funded dot.com proliferation in late 90's which lead to the total bust. Yes few well thought out companies survived but the price paid by many was enormous and could have been avoided. Trying to make quick money, jump on the bandwagon, capitalizing on rabid scenario. Does that sound familiar?

FWIW, one could argue that our entire field exists as the benefit of
that approach --- or we'd all be publishing at SOSP, e.g..

Keep in mind that our size pales in comparison to even pocket
disciplines in medicine and law. They scale, and they don't particularly
study scalability ;-) I'd be surprised if we couldn't weather this level
of growth.
[Sankar, Ravi] The new word that is played a lot these days is "sustainability"

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