Inbreeding

A number of conferences have a tendency to become rather inbred: they have a certain number of effectively permanent PC members, and only rotate a small fraction of their PC members from year to year. This is a bad idea. I believe that the core USENIX conferences, such as the annual conference and OSDI/NSDI are pretty good in this regard, as are some other conferences like SOSP. Some other systems conferences retain a much higher fraction of PC members, which I think results in a bit of tunnel vision, focusing on the same topics each year with much the same perceptions of what are good ideas and what are not.

Some conferences such as USENIX ATC have an informal policy of ensuring that a program chair serves on the PC the years before and after they chair it, which offers very strong continuity and should be adopted by all conferences.

-- FredDouglis - 01 Apr 2008