WOWCS '08 Home

Important Dates

Workshop Organizers

Overview and Goals

Submissions

Web Submission Form

Workshop on Organizing Workshops, Conferences, and Symposia for Computer Systems (WOWCS '08)
April 15, 2008
San Francisco, CA, USA

Sponsored by USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association

Co-located with the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '08), which will take place April 16–18, 2008

Important Dates
Submissions due: Friday, February 15, 2008, 11:59 p.m. PST
Notification to authors: Monday, March 17, 2008
Final papers due: Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Workshop Organizers

Program Committee
Tom Anderson, University of Washington
Richard Draves, Microsoft Research
Carla Schlatter Ellis, Duke University
Peter Honeyman, CITI, University of Michigan
Greg Minshall, University of Washington
Vivek Pai, Princeton University
Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego

Overview and Goals
Computer systems researchers place an unusually high value on conference publications, to the point that these no longer take second place to journal publications. This puts pressure on conference chairs and committees, who must handle large numbers of submissions and generate detailed, well-reasoned reviews and acceptance decisions on tight deadlines. Yet there is relatively little "institutional memory" or written folklore on how to organize computer systems conferences, and many policy issues require repeated community or PC discussions.

WOWCS will bring together conference organizers (past, present, and future) and other interested people to discuss the issues they confront. The workshop has several goals:

1. Discuss (and perhaps settle) certain contentious policy issues
   • Examples include:
     • Double-blind vs. single-blind reviews
     • Should authors disclose previous reviews of the same paper?
     • Are author-rebuttals useful?
     • When should "open reviews" be used?
     • Should we review the reviewers?
     • CS-wide citation reporting
2. Preserve folklore and experience in written form
   • Examples include:
     • What is the best structure for a large PC?
     • How to choose PC members and other volunteers
     • How to budget for conferences
     • How to handle suspected author misbehavior
     • How to handle suspected reviewer misbehavior
     • How to get a PC meeting to finish its job on time
3. Evaluate tools and techniques for conference organizers
   • Examples include:
     • Reviews of review-management software
     • Proposals for new or improved review-management software
     • Registration-management software

Submissions
The workshop invites position paper submissions on these and any other relevant topics. Submissions will be accepted based on relevance to this workshop and the likelihood that people will find them interesting; technical quality will only be judged when appropriate to the topic (e.g., methodology for a study of the effects of single-blind reviews). This workshop will favor focused discussions rather than formal presentations, and consequently the reviewing process will be relatively lightweight. The PC will favor submissions that make useful contributions with a minimum of words.

Submitted papers must be no longer than 5 single-spaced 8.5" x 11" pages, including figures, tables, and references, using 10 point type on 12 point (single-spaced) leading, within a text block 6.5" wide x 9" deep. Papers not meeting these criteria will be rejected without review, and no deadline extensions will be granted for reformatting. Pages should be numbered, and figures and tables should be legible in black and white, without requiring magnification.

Papers must be in PDF and must be submitted via the Web submission form.

The title and author name(s) should appear on the first page of the submitted paper. (Reviewing is not blind.)

For more details on the submission process, and for templates to use with LaTeX, Word, etc., authors should consult the detailed online submission requirements. Authors should also be aware of USENIX's policy on submissions.

The results of the workshop, including scribe notes of the discussions, will be made available to the community.

If you have questions about WOWCS, please contact the program chair at wowcs-chair@usenix.org.