SIGPLAN Sponsorship Proposal

Executive Summary

Events sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN benefit from SIGPLAN's name and oversight, and are underwritten financially by SIGPLAN. SIGPLAN takes a close interest in its sponsored events, and helps with their planning and organization.

Rationale

As part of its activities, ACM SIGPLAN has two types of relationship with conferences and workshops: sponsorship and in-cooperation. The primary difference between the two is that SIGPLAN takes financial responsibility for the events it sponsors, and accordingly requires a close working relationship with the organizers of the event. This page describes sponsored status; a separate page describes in-cooperation status.

Benefits

Sponsored status provides a number of benefits:

You can use the name "The ACM SIGPLAN Conference/Workshop on ..." for the event.
SIGPLAN takes financial responsibility for the event.
You have access to the PAC Fund to support participation in the event.
Any proceedings will automatically be published in the Digital Library.
ACM can provide help with site selection, including venue negotiations.
You will receive help and guidance in organizing the event, including an instruction manual.

These are in addition to the benefits available with in-cooperation status:

Announcements about the meeting can be disseminated via SIGPLAN's mailing list. (Contact infodir_sigplan@acm.org.)
You will get entries in the Call for Papers and Professional Calendar sections of Communications of the ACM, free of charge.
You can also buy an advert in CACM at a special rate. All placement of such adverts should be arranged through ACM Headquarters. Please check CACM as to the lead time required. Discounts on ACM mailing lists are also available.
You will also have space reserved in SIGPLAN Notices for the final report summarizing the meeting.

Responsibilities

The requirements for SIGPLAN sponsored status include the following:

The event must have an open call for participation and a clearly documented evaluation and review process.
The meeting must be budgeted according to the ACM sponsorship rules, which include filling out a standard budget form. The event is expected at least to break even financially.
Registration costs should be reasonable; if there is a reduced registration rate, then SIGPLAN members should be eligible for it.
For its various administrative services, such as providing help, information, publicity, mailing lists, and producing a proceedings, a percentage of conference income is budgeted for ACM services.
Critical decisions, such as setting the budget and selecting the programme chair and the programme committee, have to be approved by the SIGPLAN Executive Committee.
A final post-event report is required.

Sponsored events are encouraged to follow SIGPLAN policies and procedures, including the following:

In addition, event organizers are encouraged to contact the ACM Headquarters (incoop@acm.org), to have SIGPLAN membership materials sent directly to the conference location for display there.

Publication

A SIGPLAN-sponsored event might have an official proceedings, in physical or in electronic form, or both. If it does, the proceedings must be made available in digital form for inclusion in the ACM Digital Library, regardless of how else it is published.
If the proceedings are published on paper, the preferred route is to produce the proceedings as an ACM publication. However, alternative publishers are occasionally acceptable, usually for historical reasons.
If you wish, SIGPLAN Notices will consider publishing short abstracts of the papers presented at the meeting. This option requires negotiation with the SIGPLAN Notices editor, at least six months in advance.
Only SIGPLAN-sponsored conferences can have a proceedings published as an issue of SIGPLAN Notices. A request must be made to the SIGPLAN Executive Committee for this. Note that proceedings can be published by ACM and included in the ACM Digital Library without appearing in SIGPLAN Notices.

How to Apply

To attain SIGPLAN sponsored status, you need SIGPLAN to endorse your proposal. To achieve this, send a request to the SIGPLAN Vice Chair, preferably at least eighteen months before the event is to take place. The request should include the following information, in plain text (not PDF or Word, please):

Name, date, and location of meeting.
Focus of the meeting.
Intended audience and size.
Organization of the meeting.
Plans for soliciting conference participation, such as a call for papers/panels, etc.
Submission review process, including size and expected composition of the programme committee.
Plans for publication.
Names and affiliations of the organizers.
Relevant information about any previous meeting, such as date, organizers, paper submission/acceptance counts, attendance, site, budget, and registration fees (if applicable).
List of any other financial resources, including other sponsorships and grants.
URL of the meeting information page.

What Happens Next

The request will be considered by the SIGPLAN Executive Committee. A response to the request is usually given within two weeks. The Executive Committee can only endorse the request; final approval comes from ACM, with the acceptance of the budget submitted with the Technical Meeting Request Form.

The TMRF should be submitted to ACM at least 12 months in advance of the event start date. Official ACM approval may take 4 to 6 weeks. It is critical to await approval prior to spending funds and executing contracts. Guidelines and forms are available from the ACM website; contact them if you have any questions.

Event Series

For SIGPLAN-sponsored events that occur on a regular basis as part of a series (for example, every year), SIGPLAN offers on-going sponsorship. Such events must be organized by a Steering Committee (SC). The SC, working in partnership with the SIGPLAN Executive Committee (EC), is responsible for the overall organization and financial plan of each instance of the series. SIGPLAN has guidelines for steering committee organization.

To obtain ongoing sponsorship, the organizing group should send a proposal to the SIGPLAN Vice Chair, giving the information listed above for a sponsored event, for the previous (up to) three instances and any planned future instances. The request should also specify the proposed rules for the steering committee composition and evolution, the method for selecting the chair, and the responsibilities of the committee; these rules must conform to SIGPLAN guidelines for SCs.

If an event is granted ongoing sponsored status, then:

the Steering Committee must obtain approval for General Chair and Programme Chair selections from the SIGPLAN EC, prior to inviting the selected individuals;
approval still needs to be sought from ACM via their TMRF for each event, as explained above;
the Programme Chair of each event must obtain approval for Programme Committee members from the SIGPLAN EC, prior to inviting the selected individuals, and the selection must conform to SIGPLAN's Diversity Policy;
the General Chair of each event must provide the SIGPLAN Vice Chair with a post-event report;
the Steering Committee must contact the SIGPLAN Vice Chair when the composition or chair of the SC changes.