My interest in temporal databases has led me to chronology, the
science of time measurement, which then led me to horology, the
science of clocks. Horology is a strange mixture of technical
sophistication and old-world artistry. The prevalence of high quality
digital timepieces is obviating the search for yet more effective
escapement designs for mechanical watches. Being a computer scientist
working in a digital world, I nevertheless mourn the gradual
disappearance of mechanical watches, with their comforting regularity
of audible ticking.
A watch is a wondrous device that does its job extremely well, without
the user knowing anything about its inner workings. SIGMOD is similar
in some ways: while no one would claim that it is a precision device,
its internal operation is often mysterious. I certainly experienced
and was somewhat chagrined by my ignorance of the ways in which
various decisions within SIGMOD were made.
Just as my readings on horology have exposed some of the basic
mechanisms in watches, such as the fundamental interplay between
elasticity and inertia, my tenure as chair has provided some
understanding of how SIGMOD arrives at various decisions, from making
the many appointments to determining where the next conference should
be held.
It turns out to not be mysterious at all. Most of the decisions, as
befits a large organization, are made by committee, specifically, by
the Executive Committee, which consists of seven people, three
elected: the Chair (see the first page of this Record for a list of
everyone involved), the Vice-Chair (Meral) and the Secretary/Treasurer
(Eric), and four appointed: the SIGMOD Record editor (Mike Franklin),
the Information Director (Alberto), the chair of the SIGMOD Advisory
Board (Mike Carey), and the chair of the PODS Executive Committee
(Victor). By the way, serving as Chair of the newly formed SIGKDD
(Knowledge Discovery in Data) was taking all of Won's time, so he
resigned from the SIGMOD Executive Committee; Mike Carey is the new
chair of the Advisory Board.
The smaller decisions are hashed out by email discussion among the EC
members. While the Chair is the final arbiter, decisions are by
consensus. I am happy to say that the EC members are a quite
opinionated (this is a compliment) and also agreeable lot, so our
deliberations are generally efficient. The EC also meets about once a
year for a one-day retreat, for face-to-face discussion. We get a lot
done at these meetings.
The larger decisions deserve input from more people. The major money
decisions and most appointments first involve discussion by the EC to
frame the issues and arrive at a few specific choices, followed by
email discussion with the entire eight-member Advisory Board. For
example, the decision to go ahead with the Anthology represented a
significant outlay of funds, and so was discussed by the Advisory
Board. As another example, the location of the conference often
results in much debate, sometimes coming down to those who are kinda
wimpy and can't stand moderate temperatures, and those of us who find
temperatures in the 90's to be refreshing. This unresolved dispute is
the reason the conference is in Montreal one year and Dallas another.
Some responsibilities are delegated. For example, the conference
program chair is responsible for the technical program of the
conference, with the selection of the program committee a critical
part of that process. The Editors (Mike Franklin, Isabel Cruz and
Michael Ley) name the members of their respective editorial boards,
and are responsible for editorial policy of their publications, with
oversight and advice from the Executive Committee. The Awards
Committee decides the award recipients independently. And the
conference chair decides the destination of the book donation effort.
So that the various decisions are made with knowledge of external
factors, I have appointed liaisons with other major database
organizations (again, see the first page for this list). I feel
strongly that it benefits everyone for SIGMOD to work cooperatively
with its sister societies. This openness is already bearing
fruit. Through the hard work of Stefano Ceri, the VLDB proceedings
will be included in the SIGMOD Anthology, all 16,000 pages of quality
papers. Dave Lomet, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Bulletin of Technical
Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE), worked tirelessly to obtain the
necessary permissions to include much of that publication in the
Anthology. We are currently contacting other organizations through our
liaisons, to include the proceedings of major database conferences in
the Anthology and SIGMOD DiSC.
The EC reports to the SIG Governing Board, which is an ACM body
consisting of the chairs of all the SIGs, some three dozen at last
count. The SGB elects its own executive committee, the SGBEC (a real
mouthful), which I serve on as a member-at-large. The SGB also elects
representation on ACM Council; that person, Mary Whitton, ultimately
represents you in the decision-making in the council. Whew!
Now, on to other things. There is a service you should be aware
of. Every member of SIGMOD is (or should be) a member of the
MOD-MEMBERS mailing list. I use this list to communicate late-breaking
news to SIGMOD members. The volume of this mailing list is very low,
less than one message a month.
If you haven't received any messages from me with a subject of "SIGMOD
happenings" then you probably aren't on this list. In that case, you
should contact ACM member services to let them know about your email
address; as a member of SIGMOD you will then be automatically added to
this mailing list. You can add this information via the web at
and create an ACM WWW account. This account will provide you access to
the entire SIGMOD Online site. SIGMOD Online will be growing
dramatically, to become an essential resource for the database
community.
