Networking PC and Co.

I was recently in Berkeley for the SIGCOMM PC meeting. It was very well run by the PC chairs Nina Taft and Anja Feldmann who remained focused, modulated the discussions when they ran far too quickly or stalled, and both challenged and encouraged opinions. Lot of nice submissions, some urged by the clean-slate redesign agenda for networking, some driven by current topics (game theory, data privacy), and others from the standard fare (measurements, protocols). I had to quick-review a paper during the meeting, and did a quicker-review online of almost all the papers that were discussed, but since I had expected to quick-review more papers, I felt like I got off easy.

PC meetings give us a chance to connect with colleagues you never met, only occasionally interacted with, or plain old buddies from the past. So, over the dinner, I broached the topic of how theory and machine learning communities have yet another channel to communicate, ie., blogs and pointed people to the blogs of Lance (Bill), Suresh, Jeff, Luca, David, Scott and many others. Why doesn't the networking community do the same? I have done several of these conversations by now and the typical objections people have to blogs are:

• I don't even read blogs,
  
• I don't have time to do blogs, I am already overwhelmed by emails,
  
• I'd rather do other things when I have a free moment, be part of a real life community in my neighborhood, or
  
• I am uncomfortable with the bias it gives my voice over others in the community (I belonged to this category about 2 years ago).
  

I heard a new one this time: networking people may be more tuned to the privacy issues involved!