Vice Chair's Message
I am very glad to report that, two years in a row, SIGMOD is the only
SIG (among those ACM SIGs with 2000+ membership) with an increased
total number of members. There has been a continuous decline over the
last decade in SIG membership, and SIGMOD has also been losing
members. Last year, we were excited to see the reversal of this trend
for SIGMOD, and the increase in membership for the first time in the
last thirteen years. This year's increase is even more significant
(more than 500!). In addition to SIGMOD Anthology and DiSC which have
been very instrumental to boost membership, successful SIGMOD/PODS
conferences, new conference registration fee structures that promote
new members, and SIGMOD financial support program for undergraduate
students to attend the conference, all helped in reversing the trend
of decline in membership and resulted in a healthy increase. More than
100 new members joined SIGMOD with the SIGMOD/PODS 2000 conference at
Dallas in May. As of May 2000, SIGMOD has 2939 members; it is the
fifth largest among all 37 ACM SIG's and is still climbing up (it was
the seventh largest last year). Another good sign for strong
membership is that SIGMOD has the highest member retention rate
between large SIG's (the top ten largest). SIGMOD member retention
rate, 69%, is also one of the highest of all ACM SIG's (see the full
report at http://www.acm.org/sigs/membership). It is very
likely that we will see SIGMOD to continue climbing up in the ladder
in the list of largest SIG's in the coming years as well.
I also want to mention here that SIGMOD has recently adopted new
guidelines for conference approvals emphasizing the quality of the
conference, among other requirements such as non-conflicting time and
venue with the SIGMOD conference. Conferences with SIGMOD
in-cooperation support are also required to have their conference
proceedings to be included in SIGMOD DiSC. These guidelines are posted
in the SIGMOD web site
http://www.acm.org/sigmod/sigmodinfo. If you have
suggestions, or questions about the membership and conference
approval, please contact me.
| Meral Özsoyoglu |
| July, 2000 |
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