Proceedings of January 1983 Unicom

[Spencer W. Thomas]

Speaking of proceedings, I'm involved in the planning for the June 1984
Salt Lake City conference (don't flame to me about Utah in June, we were
originally scheduled for January, but thats a whole different story). 
In any case, we are considering requiring speakers to presubmit their
"papers" probably a month before the conference, so we can publish a
proceedings AT THE CONFERENCE.  You would get it with your registration
packet.

We feel that Usenix has grown enough that it is time to get a little
more "professional" about the conferences.  We're not asking for a final
draft 8 months ahead like SIGGRAPH, just 1 month so we can get the
proceedings out by conference time.  Wouldn't you like to have a little
more information about a talk than the title before going to it?  Of
course, if someone gets some tremendous new result between the time they
send their paper in and the conference, they would be welcome to present
it in their talk, it just wouldn't make it into the proceedings. I think
this would balance out having to wait 6 or 7 months to get them at all,
though.

Perhaps we will have two classes of talks - those which are prepared and
make it into the proceedings, and more "impromptu" (but still scheduled
ahead) ones which don't.

I would like to hear what you have to say about this possibility.  Does
anybody violently oppose having to have their talk planned out a month
ahead?  What about something like a "poster session", where you put up
your results onto a couple of pieces of posterboard, and everybody
wanders around looking at them?  Send us your input, or discuss it on
the net.

Spencer Thomas
(The opinions expressed above are mine, but are pretty much shared here.)
Mail to: usenix84 at utah-cs, {harpo,arizona,sask,hplabs}!utah-cs!usenix84