Dear colleagues,
the organisation of TC6 events is sometimes not so easy. Here is another example:
A programme committee of a large event in August 2000 is composed of - 13 TC6 delegates (I'm one of those guys) - 18 other members (according to the email address list).
The committee members received for reviewing purpose: - an impressive list of 473 submissions which was shortened to 'only' 455 submissions by removing the submissions which delivered not more than an abstract - a request to produce a grade (for all 455 papers???) by a number 5 (strongly accept) or 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 (strongly reject); an explanation of the grade would be possible but is not required.
So far so good but: - a lot of manuscripts are available only as hardcopy version and could be requested by regular mail from the organisors (less than three weeks before the end of the evaluation deadline) - the attempt to get at a least one of the electronically submitted papers fails due to continuous timeout - apparently no PC member knows which paper should be reviewed by whom and how many papers should be reviewed per PC member; it might be that 342 papers would not get a single review whereas 51 manuscripts would get more than ten reviews, who knows??? But in this case it is probably the safer alternative no to do any review at all (which is apparently the strategy of all or almost all TC6 PC members) - and the (desired?) outcome will very probably be: - that the PC chairman will fix the whole programme alone - and that he will correctly state that TC6 was not helpful at all for the reviewing procedure.
I don't know whether this is the intention of TC6 when we organize an event.
Best regards Otto
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SPANIOL Otto, Prof. Dr. Tel.: +49-241-80 21400/401 Aachen University of Technology Home: +49-241-57 45 90 Computer Science Department FAX: +49-241-8888 220 D - 52056 Aachen Email: Office address: spaniol@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Ahornstrasse 55 www: http://www-i4.informatik. D - 52074 Aachen rwth-aachen.de GERMANY