Announcing and soliciting presenters for

SIGCOMM OO'99

Thursday, 2 September 1999 AD, 18:00-19:00 GMT-0400 (EDT)

Important note: the winner will receive a really cool and valuable prize; read on for details.

The SIGCOMM OO Session has a short history of several dubious years of outrageousness; a summary of past sessions is at the end of this announcement. Outrageous opinions are solicited in areas including, but not limited to:

• how to do something new or better (*)
• the future of networking, or the next big thing after...
  (for example IP, ATM, TCP, Web, Java, XML)
• the secure Internet
• QoS in the Internet
• automatically generating and spontaneously enhancing provably correct secure intelligent streaming multimedia agents for standard ad-hoc self-organising petabit active mobile wireless all-optical networks
• architecture and implementation of IPv7 (see last 3 items)
• how to get back to the good old days of:
  • bang paths through ihpn4 and decvax
  • all of netnews readable in less than an hour
  • document retrieval using FTP (what Web?)
  • email without spam
  • a net without AOL and WebTV users
  • SNA, DECnet, and X.25
• how to obtain funding for networking research
  • from government funding agencies
  • from industry without any future relevance to products
  • from US congress and EU without regulation
• tips on publishing and getting into conferences as selective as SIGCOMM
• how to improve SIGCOMM

If you have an outrageous opinion you would like to share, submit a really short summary (2-50 words) to James Sterbenz with "Outrageous Opinion" in the subject line (submissions without this subject will only be considered if noticed amongst all my other email; if you've already submitted something and your name is not Jon Crowcroft, I suggest you resubmit). Presenters will be selected from the multitude of submissions by at least one SIGCOMM'99 conference committee member (I may get help).

If selected, you must actually show up for SIGCOMM'99 in general, and the OO Session in particular. You will have a maximum of four minutes to present your OO to the SIGCOMM'99 attendees. Presenters will be judged on both outrageous technical merit and artistic impression by a distinguished(*) panel of international judges. Presenters may be asked to confirm that they are not taking performance enhancing drugs (but mind altering drugs are acceptable). Both the audience and judges will be enjoying good wine and local brew, thus the clarity of presentation may become less important in the scoring as the evening progresses.

(*) unless we can't find anyone distinguished from a particular country, in which case we'll take whoever shows up.

There will be various worthless junk awarded to runners up, however the grand prize winner will receive

a new Palm V!

Really! I am not making this up. It may even be preloaded with a memo containing the SIGCOMM'99 program, most of which will already have transpired.

PREVIOUS YEARS OO Sessions

Spanning the Globe, ACM sports has presented the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat for over three years. Past OO sessions have consisted of:

• OO'95 Boston (the first of the millennium)
  "...there will be an Outrageous Opinions Session where you can participate or listen to ideas that may be outrageous today, but perhaps reality tomorrow...."
  
  Hosted by Bruce Davie, packed room, lots of opinions, lots of "ATM vs Big-I". Both serious and funny.
  
  
• OO'96 Stanford
  Not held due to preponderance of California wine for the social events.
  
  
• OO'97 Cannes
  "....Volunteer speakers will be allowed to defend outrageous opinions seated on the pool diving board ... An open bar will help unfortunate speakers to recover, and audience to warm up."
  
  Hosted by Chase Bailey, great fun - some speakers actually ran into the Mediterranean! The audience voted that ALL needed to go for a dip; Mary Baker was most funny & serious at the same time.
  
  
• OO'98 Vancouver
  "For a WHALE of a good time ... present YOUR latest and greatest fish story or Turing-award idea" (for this to make sense look at the artwork on the SIGCOMM'98 proceedings).
  
  Hosted by Chris Edmondson and run in the format of the Gong Show. While the winning presentation didn't get nearly as a valuable or geeky prize as will be offered this year, Shawn Ostermann's winning OO was really outstanding and is viewable on line at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/sigcomm98/Ostermann/index.html.