[Tccc] (changed topic): too many meetings

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Sankar, Ravi wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I totally agree with this. There were only flagship conferences such
> as ICC, Globecom, Infocom and few specialized conferences LCN etc 15
> or 20 years ago.

Sigcomm goes back that far, as does Milcom. There were other meetings
that networking people went to that they don't go to today - e.g., SOSP
had networking stuff as far back as 1983.

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")?

- 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 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".

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.

Joe
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