Re: [Tccc] presentations by non-authors

Good to see something besides yet another call for papers
on the TCCC list.

> I think this is a symptom of a larger problem, namely that
> many conferences are not all that effective as means of
> information dissemination:
>
> - the community is split among dozens of events;

This may be a bit off-topic, but we
indeed have too many conferences in networking, and I would
hazard a guess that we also have many many more people working
in this area than the complexity or utility of the problems demands.
My guess is that the larger size of the community is driven
by the disproportionately greater availability of funding
(at least for a while) in networking than in other research
areas. This is a resource allocation problem, and we haven't
internalized all the wonderful work on fair allocation
enough to wonder if we are asking for an unfair share of
the research resources available to the computing community.
Of course, don't ask me to move into another area,
or stop writing proposals on networking -:)

> recently the expenses for attending an IEEE conference have
> increased to the degree that I cannot afford to do so.

As organizations run with member funds, I think it would
be reasonable to require IEEE and ACM conferences to make
financial data publicly (and easily) available for all to see.
I have been convinced to chair joint ACM MobiCom-MobiHoc in
2010, and I will ask ACM if they will publish such
information for these conferences.
I suspect that hotel contracts may be bound by confidentiality
clauses, but expenditures by and on the organizing committee should
not have this constraint.

> I have been attending, more or less regularly, a very respectable conference that
> takes place on a university campus - Allerton Conference at University of
> Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These days they charge around $200 as registration fee,
> which seems very reasonable to me. Certainly it can be done - the folks at
> UIUC have been doing it for the last forty-five years without turning
> the conference into a money making instrument.

Many of us at UIUC (admittedly, a biased view) also believe that the
quality of the Allerton conference is higher than many of the so-called
"top" conferences, without having a particularly stringent review process.

On a related note, at UIUC, we recently organized a summer school on
wireless systems, at zero cost to the approximtely 170 attendees
(most costs paid by NSF, and industry sponsors).
UIUC abosrbed the costs of the venue, and provided much of
the secretarial staff at no cost to the event.
This is a good arrangement for such an event (considering
the lower cost), but also for the universities (since it bring
an audience that might not otherwise be able to visit the campus).

Unfortunately, using a university venue is not always practical,
particularly for the larger conferences.

- nitin

_______________________________________________
Tccc mailing list
Tccc@lists.cs.columbia.edu
https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/cucslists/listinfo/tccc