1. CIDR is in danger of losing its way: My Advice to Weikum, Hellerstein and Franklin by Michael Stonebraker 1

2. Program Committees in our Field
Reward scholarship on narrow ideas
Trash “loosy goosey” papers
Trash anything half-baked
Trash anything that resembles a “war story”
Operate by consensus
Net result: SIGMOD/VLDB style conferences
with paper sessions full of LPUs, of interest to 10 people in the world

3. How Has CIDR Avoided this Fate So Far?
Slanted selection of PC members
Specific “non-SIGMOD” reviewing guidelines
PC is advisory – organizers make actual decisions
And one of them reads every paper
And the organizers have not operated by consensus
E.g. PC reviews sometimes ignored

4. CIDR Leadership is Being Passed On
So how to avoid the SIGMODification of CIDR?
Answer: double-blind reviewing (just kidding)

5. My Real Advice to the “New Gray Beards”
Put your own mark on the conference
E.g. might make sense to move to “demo- only” on the theory that “you have nothing to say if you can’t show it”
E.g. might make sense to move to “poster- only” on the theory that this fosters discussion
YGIGH (your good idea goes here)

6. My Real Advice to the “New Gray Beards”
Ruthlessly ignore reviewer opinions
This is really crucial
Don’t leave Asilomar
Enables a 3 person organizing committee – who can make decisions quickly and easily
Figure out some solution to “paper overload”
Which is very likely to descend on CIDR