The first ever virtual SIGMOD

A few days back I participated in the first-ever fully virtual SIGMOD due to COVID-19. The conference was a great success given the tremendous change of nature the organization (and the participants eventually) had to go through. In this post, I would like to summarize a few lessons learned from this experience.

• First and foremost, this was a colossal effort from the conference organizers (general chairs David Maier and Rachel Pottinger, PC chairs Anhai Doan and Wang-Chiew Tan, and all other conference officers). Thanks to all for this amazing effort!
• The virtual conference gave the opportunity to a wider community to participate in the conference and immerse in the data management research the SIGMOD community is conducting.
• Having the talks captured beforehand significantly helped in terms of organization, however, it came at a cost. I got the feeling that many talks focused on providing a solid advertisement for the work rather than sharing technical details. I know that a conference talk should do both and that it’s hard to find the perfect balance, but I feel that this time the scales were tipped. This is not meant to criticize the quality of the presentations, which was excellent, rather, to emphasize that for most talks I was so excited that I craved for more technical details — of course, this probably means that all these talks did a great job in advertising their work.
• The virtual Q & A enabled wide interactions, however, in many cases, it was not easy to convey a technical question. Face-to-face technical discussions can go deeper, faster! On the other hand, I think that the virtual Q & A was a great success for the panels where many questions are somewhat more high level and what usually scared junior people (a room full of seasoned researchers) was not there, so everyone got to ask their questions in several exciting panels “The Next 5 Years: What Opportunities Should the Database Community Seize to Maximize its Impact?“, “Startups Founded by Database Researchers“, and also the very important “New Researchers Symposium“, and various social events including the “Women in DB: Experiences and Perspectives“.
• Last but not least, a recurring discussion during every SIGMOD is about the official SIGMOD membership. I would like to make three suggestions:
  1. To everyone interested in data management research, please make sure you are an ACM member (https://www.acm.org/membership) and a SIGMOD member (http://sigmod.org/membership/)!
  2. To future SIGMOD conference (but also VLDB) organizers, let’s have these links easily accessible from the conference websites (not only during registration).
  3. To the SIGMOD leadership, let’s make the registration an easier and seamless process. Since the cost is so small (10$-15$ if memory serves well), let’s also make it equally easy to pay (e.g., via PayPal or other easy-to-use methods). Let’s also consider different prices for parts of the world that a smaller price would make a difference!
  4. And a bonus suggestion: let’s advertise and clarify the benefits of these memberships. For example, now that more and more of our papers are publicly available many young students may not see why they officially need to be ACM/SIGMOD members, however, being part of a community that works towards having free access to all of our work and help further shaping its future, is a great incentive!