Proceedings of January 1983 Unicom

[eric at aplvax.UUCP]

	I think it is probably time for Unicom to require papers in advance.
I suspect that only 1 month is not enough time (particularly when you will
have to threaten some presenters with bodily harm to get the paper out of them).
But I have been involved in papers and presentations to several different
conferences, and Unicom was the only one that did not require papers in
advance, and did not distribute proceedings at the conference. Imagine how
nice it would have been to open the proceedings and learn the talk you 
thought would be useful for your system management was really on financial
accounting, ot systems accounting.

	The flip side of this coin, however, means the session leaders must
get information (acceptance, rejection, comments) back much earlier to the
speakers. We did not learn that our paper to the July Unicom was accepted
until the beginning of June, and then only because we called to find out.
The copyright forms did not arrive until only a couple of weeks before the
conference. I don't know about other sites, but our travel and legal departments
both take longer than that to function.

	It is apparent that Unicom is now a major conference. I think it is
time that all involved recognize this, and start taking lessons from the
other conferences to make everything run more smoothly. The days of only
a hundred gurus is over, for better or for worse.

						Eric Bergan
						...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!eric