Fun Friday: Just Singing Those Conference Paper Registration Consternation Blues

OK, so we put together a very nice neat academic paper "Beyond Network Processors: Using Dataflow Architecture for Low-Power Low Latency TCP Processing" for a conference. A really fun paper to write and to read. So fun I'd rather place it in a journal, get paid, and get compliments from real readers than send it to a stodgy corporate fest (although a few conferences like ACE are real cool). But when you got to do it, you do it.

But you know how these things go - you submit a lot of work, get comments back of the variety of "you caaant spell" and "your such a bad writer" variety, get gonged by a "secret" competitor on the review panel that you all know is lurking there in the shadows, complain, resubmit, and so forth. After about a gazillion times (during which I've written more articles, books and papers than the entire committee together), you get an acceptance dependent on paying for your registration. Well, if the company pays, it's OK with me.

But sometimes I just think these conferences are just too amateur to be tolerated, especially with respect to their deadlines and requirements. The one thing you'd be serious about is a deadline, right? Nope, maybe not...

I received a call for papers via the end2end interest group. My colleagues were readying a final submission of the paper per the instructions in the call for papers email that was due. Yes, we tend to wait until the last minute - when you're geographically distributed that tends to happen.

They came to me desperate to find that the website said they should be registered two days prior, on Saturday no less. Yet this email has no registration requirement on it - only the submission deadline.

Did they screw up. Nope. I checked myself - assuredly, the date for submission had been moved back to later in the week (as is often the case), but they also imposed a registration deadline no one knew about. I reread this email call for papers - there was no registration requirement mentioned at all! So I don't find they were at fault.

Well, I tried to contact everyone I could think of on the committee, but I think everyone was out to lunch. I finally got a message back, by then too late to be of interest - we'd made other arrangement and everyone was back to work.

Honestly, I've been writing for professional and trade press for 15 years, and also done a number of papers over the years. So perhaps conference committees, who's only claim to fame is fairness and feedback, ought to work by more careful processes. Otherwise, they just seem like a bunch of flaky academics with an agenda. And that's definitely not worth anyone's effort to fight - or pay to attend.