First impressions

[Dick Dunn]

In article <1815 at ucsd.EDU>, brian at ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) writes:
> I remarked earlier this year that perhaps the Usenix conferences were
> being held too often; the evidence at the time was the list of papers to
> be presented at the Baltimore conference...

There's a good case for that.  There are other reasons that people want two
conferences a year, of course.  But I think Baltimore had particularly bad
luck because of two timing-related phenomena.  First, the Baltimore CFP
asked for full papers by the submission deadline; I believe that San Diego
had allowed for extended abstracts and I know that the upcoming DC needs
only abstracts.  This considerably tightens an author's deadline--it might
shift the date you can get something done by 4-6 weeks.  Second, the
conferences don't split the year evenly--it's more like a 5-7 month split.
This gives less time after USENIX[n-1] to get ready for USENIX[n].  Combine
these two and you'd expect that Baltimore might have at most 2/3 of the
submissions of a winter conference.  The submission deadline for Baltimore
was only a few days after San Diego--it left essentially no time to rethink
a paper in light of what had just been presented.

> Twice-yearly Usenix conferences are traditional; I don't seriously
> imagine that will be changed soon...

I hope not.  For those of us in the technical hinterlands, it's a good way
to find out pieces of what's going on--something which needs to be done
more than once a year!

>...Or perhaps there should be a series of half-day tutorials presented
> throughout the week.

I've heard people complaining that there were too many good tutorials on
too few days.  Perhaps there would be some way to expand the tutorial part
of the conference and shrink the tech sessions correspondingly?  Perhaps
you could split it 3:2 days tutorial:tech?  Or perhaps use Wed AM for
half-day more advanced tutorials?  That could draw people who want a
tutorial and the tech sessions.  It would allow people coming for just the
tech sessions to arrive Wed AM instead of Tue PM, which saves a day's
lodging.  BUT if you shrink the tech sessions too much, it won't be worth a
long journey.  There's a zillion little people-interaction issues like
this...I can speculate but I don't really know if these ideas could work.
(I don't even want to think about the effect on logistics...the folks who
do that stuff juggle an amazing number of factors.)
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd at ico.isc.com    uucp: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd     (303)449-2870
   ...Simpler is better.