I agree about the main risk. I didn’t make this clear, but my concern about the possible transition – are there enough people willing to commit and deliver – applies to the steady state, as well, and is arguably more of a worry for the steady state than the transition period. On the voting ballot, this rationale for not going solo falls under “maintaining continuity”.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that IEEE provides an effective buffer. The only checks I’m aware of are the budget before the conference and the financial report afterwards. None of the ones I’ve been involved in have resulted in questions let alone changes. There are no checks in place to make sure we stay within budget, nor to make sure the proceedings are actually published. In fact, last year we had to prod IEEE to make sure the proceedings appeared in the digital library; they still only appear in one of the two libraries (IEEExplore but not CSDL).

I also agree about attempting to make changes from within. We have been trying to do so for a quite a while. The grievances started more than fifteen years ago. About five years ago (I don’t remember the exact year) there was an actual vote during the business meeting with a clear majority to go solo, but we didn’t act on it. If nothing else, this should have sent a clear message. In the mean time there have been some changes but the demand for further changes seems to grow faster.

In my opinion we (also) need a change in attitude with respect to service to the community. This holds irrespective of whether CCC becomes independent or not. I’m not sure how to affect such a change. Becoming independent may help by increasing the sense of ownership and thereby hopefully also responsibility – we wouldn’t be able to blame IEEE or anyone else anymore – but this may be wishful thinking. On the ballot the last question is intended to get a sense of the level of commitment people are willing to make.

Like others, my interaction with IEEE as a local organizer for CCC was mainly a source of frustration rather than assistance. In particular, the fact that the incentives force us to aim for as tiny a surplus as possible (since further surpluses don’t get returned to the conference) is stressful for the local organizers (since it raises the risk of running a deficit, for which I think the conference gets penalized), and it does not seem like a good business practice. Also, a fair amount of time was wasted with the various on-line forms and bureaucracy. The only benefits I felt from the IEEE as a local organizer is that it provided a set of checklists and deadlines, which were reminders of the many things that need to get done in organizing a conference (as well as many useless things forced on us by IEEE). This of course can be substituted by having good institutional memory within the conference.

In my mind, the main risk of “going solo” is not any of the things listed in the manifesto, but the way in which having an established scholarly society provides stability in case the conference goes through a period with irresponsible leadership (whether in the steering committee or local arrangements chairs), which could conceivably squander the conference’s money, fail to publish proceedings, or do other disastrous things. Thus, when setting up an organization to run an independent conference, it’s important to put in many checks and balances to prevent these kinds of problems in the future.

In principle, scholarly societies like IEEE and ACM are supposed to represent the community’s interests, and if we want change, we should do all we can to effect change from within, and only go solo if we conclude that this is not going to work. For this reason, I think it’s really important that we hear from the IEEE TCMF chair on the state of effecting change within IEEE.

On becoming a joint IEEE/ACM conference: I have interacted with IEEE and ACM in very different ways, so it is difficult to do a real comparison. I was never a local organizer for an ACM conference (and had a relatively painless experience as an ACM PC chair), but I do have a much better understanding of ACM as organization (having served on ACM Council for the past 5 years) than I do for IEEE. I have heard that ACM is better to work with for conference organizers, but I have no direct experience with that. I am familiar with ACM’s reaction to open access, which has been much slower than I’d like, but I don’t know how it compares to what IEEE is doing. It is now possible for ACM SIGs to purchase open access for their conference proceedings, but I think the current cost (at $1000-$1500 per paper) would be prohibitively expensive for CCC. I hope that ACM will find a way to bring these costs down, but it’s hard to predict whether that will happen any time soon.

These are good points. It is true that only a fraction of the community really knows what is involved in organizing a conference like CCC. On the other hand, there are also aspects that the entire community should have a say on. Open access is the main one that comes to mind. The ballot will ask about the rationale of the voters.

As mentioned in the post, the vote will be non-binding, and the final decision rests with the steering committee. Besides the outcome of the vote and the main reasons, other considerations will be taken into account, too.

I would urge the steering committee to focus on collecting data from people with first-hand knowledge – past local organizers of CCC and other IEEE-affiliated conferences such as FOCS on one hand, and people involved with conferences that were run independently, or transitioned to being independent, on the other hand. And, if the conference does become independent, some people will need to commit to making the effort to ensure it starts off running well.

(The blog posts linked above contain two important data points – Luca T’s bad experiences with IEEE as a local organizer of CCC, and Luca A’s good experience as an independepent organizer.)

For those reading this, what is your opinion?