1. The Program Chair may not submit papers to the conference. The SIGPLAN Executive Committee recommends to steering committees of sufficiently large conferences that their program committee members and the general chair also not be allowed to submit papers. If program committee members are allowed to submit papers, their papers should be held to a higher standard to avoid the appearance of impropriety. As a Program Chair, you should make all Program Committee members and reviewers aware of SIGPLAN's policies on reviewing of conference paper submissions. You should also make Program Committee members aware of ACM's Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism.


2. The conference steering committee should be consulted for any changes to the accepted way of organizing and running the conference.


3. You, the Program Chair, in consultation with the General Chair, should decide on any general policies relating to the program committee (PC) such as:

• Are the PC members expected to attend the program committee meeting where the papers are selected? SIGPLAN expects PC members to attend the meeting except in unusual circumstances.
• When and where will the PC meeting be held?
• Who pays for the travel expenses of the PC members?
• Who pays for the conference registration of the PC members? Typically, the PC member is responsible for all of his/her expenses, including registration. If a decision is made to provide funding for some/all of the members, these expenses must be included in the budget.

4. The previous year’s Program Chair for the same conference is a good resource. You should contact the person for suggestions.


5. With help from the conference chair, develop a list of potential program committee (PC) members. In formulating a potential list of PC members, the General Chair and Program Chair should be mindful of SIGPLAN's diversity policy.


6. Send the list to the SIGPLAN Chair and Vice Chair for their comments and approval (1 year prior to meeting).


7. Make arrangements for the program committee meeting - place and time. (1 year prior)


8. After SIGPLAN approval of PC members, ask the people on the list to serve. Please explain what is expected of them and any policy decisions. Give them the date for the PC meeting. Expect some people to refuse to serve so have a list of alternates. Get approval from the SIGPLAN Chair and Vice Chair for the alternates.


9. The conference steering committee should be consulted for any changes to the accepted way of handling the submissions. 


10. Develop a call for papers and get approval of call from the Vice Chair. Note: you can produce a preliminary call without including PC members. Make sure to put the call on the Web site for the conference (established by the conference chair). The Web page should refer prospective authors to SIGPLAN's Republication Policy and to ACM's Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism. Once the conference web page is in place, have a link to the page from the SIGPLAN conference page by contacting the SIGPLAN Information Director.

The conference web page should include information about the various benefits offered to SIGPLAN members attending SIGPLAN conferences. These benefits include travel and lodging assistance for student authors and assistance for members who need a companion care-provider in order to attend a SIGPLAN conference. Please see SIGPLAN's Professional Activities Committee web page for more details.
 
11. Many SIGPLAN conferences have included author response as part of the paper review process and the general feedback concerning author response has been positive (see Experiences with Author Response at PLDI and ICFP 2004, Kathleen Fisher and Craig Chambers, (SIGPLAN Notices, Dec. 2004). Program chairs and steering committees are encouraged to consider allowing author response or rebuttals as part of the paper review process.
    
    
12. Set up the paper submission web site. SIGPLAN has arranged for bulk provision of conference management services from START V2 and Rich Gerber; this includes web hosting at softconf.com. Conference and workshop chairs may take advantage of these services, and the cost will be paid by SIGPLAN. Conference and workshop chairs are free to make alternative arrangements, but SIGPLAN does not undertake to cover costs for such arrangements. START V2, includes support for the ABCD rating scale [Nier00], author feedback, and double-blind reviewing.
    
    [Nier00] Oscar Nierstrasz, Identify the Champion.
    
    Some advice: START makes it easy to include ratings on a large number of different scales, but please don't do this. Most experienced PC chairs use only two scales, an overall rating and an expertise rating. It also works best to have just two or three text fields: one for a summary of the paper (this is optional), one for comments for both the PC and the authors, and one for comments to be seen by the PC only. The ABCD scale avoids ranking papers by average: instead you can group papers by highest and lowest rating (not a linear scale, since AD neither precedes nor follows BC).
     
    For more details see: Conferences with improved management and style, Philip Wadler, SIGPLAN Notices, Feb. 2006.

    SIGPLAN solicits feedback on START V2; we often suggest improvements to the system. If you choose not to use START V2, please let us know why. If you use START V2, please let us know your experience. The SIGPLAN contact for START V2 is Greg Morrisett.
    

13. Before papers are received, develop an evaluation procedure. Send received papers and a description of the evaluation procedure to the PC members.


14. During the meeting,

• decide on any policies that should be in effect such as:
• What happens if a member has a conflict of interest?
• What defines a conflict of interest?
• What are the rules of confidentiality?
• Do you want to have a best paper/s award/s?
• decide how many papers you want to accept
• decide what papers should be accepted
• plan the sessions and the session chairs

Also, it is strongly recommended that the program chair have an assistant that helps the program chair at the program committee meeting. Having an assistant that takes on certain administrative and logistical tasks during the meeting allows the program chair to concentrate on leading the discussions of papers. Typical duties of the an assistant would be to keep track of the disposition of papers for the program committee, interface with the on-line review system, and record any relevant information about a particular paper (e.g., paper Y paper is being shepherded by committee member X, committee member X agrees to revise their on-line review, etc.). Past program chairs have used graduate students or post-docs as assistants with good results.