Call for Non-Paper Sessions

It is well known that a conference is more than just its technical paper sessions. The informal hallway chats, mentoring, posters, and outrageous opinions sessions all play crucial roles in shaping our individual career paths and the mindset of the community as a whole. Traditionally, program committees have focused on the formal research paper sessions and allowed these informal sessions to develop organically. While this approach has served us well, there is a growing sentiment that our community would benefit from the organized inclusion of non-paper sessions.

The expectation is that these non-paper sessions will attract participants with diverse identities, ideas, and expertise, helping us reshape and reimagine the future of SIGCOMM. Additionally, these sessions would facilitate the creation of special-interest sub-groups, catalyzing innovation in ambitious, unexplored, or underexplored research topics under the SIGCOMM umbrella.

Last year, we initiated the non-paper sessions as an experiment, hoping the community would embrace them as another avenue for participation and further enrich the SIGCOMM conference experience. Given the positive feedback, we will continue organizing and expanding the non-paper sessions for SIGCOMM 2025. We encourage community members to submit proposals for exciting and edifying sessions that will help broaden the scope of ideas exchanged at SIGCOMM.

We seek proposals for both technical and non-technical non-paper sessions:

Proposals for technical sessions should ensure that they do not have substantial overlap with events that SIGCOMM already has: for example, they should not be proposals for workshops, tutorials, or poster sessions. These sessions can (and probably should) deviate from the traditional format of a single presenter speaking on a stage. Some examples of possible technical sessions include: invited talks or panels discussing how developments in other areas should affect networking research; panels providing a historical perspective on how networking has evolved; sessions discussing new software tools, libraries, or libraries that could be of interest to the SIGCOMM community; sessions with lightning talks including ones on early-stage work; hackathons; and talks from participants who do not normally attend SIGCOMM such as maintainers of open-source projects or network administrators.

Proposed non-technical sessions should be of interest to the SIGCOMM community, and can include events that help with “personal” networking (by introducing attendees to each other); and mentoring events.

Interest in the SIGCOMM community will be our main evaluation criterion for sessions of either type.

These non-paper sessions will not conflict with the paper sessions. As has been mentioned, SIGCOMM 2025 will run as a dual-track conference, and at most one non-paper session will take place concurrently with another non-paper session.

• Submissions are in the form of a 750-word abstract at HotCRP.
• Your submission must fit within 750 words, and should answer the following questions: (1) What is the goal of the proposed session? (2) Who is the targeted audience?, (3) How does it benefit the SIGCOMM community?, and (4) What are the specific logistical requirements for the proposed session and related flexibilities?
• If your session requires attendance from specific people (e.g., panelists, community members to act as mentors or open source contributors), please include a list of names. Please also let us know if you have asked them about attending SIGCOMM and your session and if they have agreed to do so. We will give priority to sessions where attendees have already been contacted. Note, this list of attendees does not need to fit within the 750-word limit.
• Submissions should not have content that is similar to tutorials or workshops. There is a separate call for workshops that should be used for this purpose.
• The sessions proposed must fit in a 45-minute time slot.
• Proposal submissions are not anonymous.

• Submissions will be reviewed primarily on the relevance and importance to the SIGCOMM community. A secondary consideration will be logistical feasibility—for example, if the session requires a drastically different room format, there may not be sufficient time to do so between sessions.
• At the end of the period, the review committee will recommend a selection of non-paper sessions at the conference to the program-committee chairs.

Proposal submission deadline	May 9, 2025, AOE (Updated)
Acceptance notification	May 15, 2025, AOE