TITLE: Tough Choices
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 26, 2004  1:11 PM
DESC: objectivity in a professional network
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Today I've been working on
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/2004/ShowPage.do?id=Home">OOPSLA 2004</A>.
If you use or study object-oriented techniques and have never been to
OOPSLA, then you should definitely try to make it to Vancouver in October.
OOPSLA is an electric conference, and Vancouver is a great conference town.

I'm chair of this year's
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/2004/ShowEvent.do?id=educators_symposium">Educators Symposium</A>,
which promises to be a lot of fun.  Alan Kay -- who this year has won the
Turing Award, the Draper Prize, and Kyoto Prize -- is giving our keynote
address.  We have a great line-up of papers and activities, too.  Most of
my work as chair is done, as the program is mostly set.  With the help of
my program committee, I have a few panels and activities to finalize yet.
The last big task I face is the one I'm doing now: choosing among the many
deserving applicants for Educator Scholarships.

OOPSLA is a conference of SIGPLAN.  Each year, SIGPLAN generously supports
a number of scholarships to OOPSLA for educators, so that these folks can
learn about the latest in OO technology and use that to improve the
teaching of OOP in our colleges and universities.  I think that the
educators add to the conference, too, by bringing teaching ideas that
help trainers and by bringing an excitement to the professional population.

In OOPSLA's salad days of the late 1990s, SIGPLAN was able to offer a large
scholarship fund.  In recent years, OOPSLA has not been as profitable.
Fortunately, SIGPLAN continues to support the scholarships, but with an
understandably smaller pot of money.

Low supply makes awarding the scholarships even harder than usual.
The demand for scholarships hasn't gone down, and I find that nearly
all of the applicants are deserving.  This problem is tough enough,
but it is complicated by a couple of other factors:
<UL>
<LI> Through my own work in the OOPSLA, patterns, and SIGCSE communities,
     I know many of the applicants, or their colleagues.
<LI> Several of my program committee members have applied.  That's tough
     both because of the previous bullet and because it removes them from
     my pool of reviewers.
</UL>

The program committee has implemented a couple of ways to make the
selection process more objective.  But no set of rules can shield me
from the selection process, as ultimately I have to sign off on the
awards.

As one program committee member told me in e-mail, "That's why they pay
you the big bucks."  I laughed then, but I don't feel like laughing
right now.
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