Guidelines for the General Chair of a SIGPLAN Event

Executive Summary

You may be an experienced conference organizer, in which case much of the advice on this page may already be familiar to you. Nevertheless, even experienced organizers sometimes forget some important points, so please at least skim this page, paying particular attention to the following:

SIGPLAN's conference submission review policy
SIGPLAN's diversity policy
if you plan to request in-cooperation or sponsored status, do so well in advance (twelve or eighteen months, respectively)
seek approval for important roles (PC Chair, and for a sponsored event also PC members) from SIGPLAN Vice-Chair, before sending invitations
consult with the conference Steering Committee before diverging from any existing conventions

Programme Chair

Select potential Programme Chair(s) and send their names to SIGPLAN Chair and Vice-Chair for approval. Get approval before asking the person to serve (18 months prior to the event). Make sure the Programme Chair reviews SIGPLAN's conference submission review policy and diversity policy.

Date and Location

Select three potential sites for the conference and send them to the ACM representative and the SIGPLAN Vice-Chair. If the event is part of a series, then the date of the conference has probably been established by the time you agreed to serve as chair (two years prior to the meeting). Please be careful about what information you provide directly to the hotels, so as not to reduce ACM's negotiating leverage.

Submission and Review Policies

The Programme Chair may not submit papers to the conference, and SIGPLAN Executive Committee recommends that the General Chair also not be allowed to submit papers. The conference steering committee should be consulted for any changes to the accepted way of organizing and running the conference. The SIGPLAN Executive Committee serves as the steering committee for those conferences without steering committees of their own.

Approval and Call for Papers

Develop a timeline, at least eighteen months in advance of the conference date. Unless the conference is part of a series which already has approval for ongoing sponsorship, submit to the SIGPLAN Vice-Chair a SIGPLAN sponsorship request form eighteen months before the date of the conference. If you are unsure as to whether you need to submit a request form, ask the SIGPLAN Vice Chair. An ACM preliminary approval form (PAF) must be submitted in order to issue a call for papers. Submitting a PAF also causes the conference to be added to ACM's master calendar.

Website

Establish a web site for the conference and send the URL to the SIGPLAN information director (as soon as date and site are determined). You can put a preliminary call on the web without listing the programme committee, but a PAF must have been approved.

Financial Support for Students

The Professional Activities Committee of SIGPLAN has been established to award travel grants for students to present at SIGPLAN-sponsored events. Please mention its availability on your web page. PAC also has supported programmes for underrepresented groups. If you would like to explore this possibility, please contact the PAC chair, listed on the PAC web page.

Consider seeking NSF funding to support student participation too. If you do so, do it well in advance, and consider specifying ACM as the recipient of the funds, so that they can handle disbursement.

Organizational Team

Select other members of the organizational team (e.g., local arrangements chair, publicity chair, publications chair, tutorial chair, etc). Send the names to the SIGPLAN Chair and Vice-Chair, one year before the event. Complete the TMRF budget form. The budget must include line items for contingency and return-to-SIG fees.

Local arrangements (such as registration and hotel management) for the main SIGPLAN conferences PLDI, OOPSLA, POPL, and ICFP are usually handled by a professional organization.

The conference steering committee should be consulted about any changes to the accepted way of organizing and running the conference.

Finances

ACM handles the bank accounts for sponsored conferences. Send email to the ACM Representative to SIGPLAN for an advance. Expenses for reimbursement should also be sent to the ACM Representative to SIGPLAN.

Programme Committee

Help the Programme Chair to select the programme committee. The list of potential committee members has to be approved by the SIGPLAN Chair and Vice-Chair before the members are invited. You and the PC Chair should decide on policies for submission and revewing (see Guidelines for Program Committee Chair).

Satellite Events

Co-located conferences or workshops make your event more attractive to participants. Consider appointing a workshop chair to coordinate them. Establish a deadline for submission of workshop proposals. You should contact chairs of co-located events and plan the common advance programme, joint technical sessions, joint social events, etc. You should consider workshops on "hot" topics. Have the workshop chairs submit a proposal to the SIGPLAN Vice-Chair, as specified in the In-Cooperation or Sponsorship web pages.

Preparing the Programme

Once the conference programme is set, prepare an advance programme that can be posted on the conference's web page. The advance programme can also be used to create a schedule of events to be handed out at the on-site conference registration.

Post-event Reporting

Send a report at the end of the conference to the SIGPLAN Vice-Chair. The report should include information about any workshops that co-located with the conference. Please include:

number of attendees, broken down into categories (ACM members, students, SIGPLAN members),
number of papers and/or proposals submitted and the number accepted,
financial information,
general description of events that went well and those that did not, and
discussion of problems.

Important Email Addresses

SIGPLAN Chair: chair_sigplan@acm.org
SIGPLAN Vice Chair: vc_sigplan@acm.org
SIGPLAN Information Director: infodir_sigplan@acm.org
ACM Representative to SIGPLAN (Fran Spinola): spinola@hq.acm.org