ACM SIGCOMM has initiated a program to fund special projects of benefit to the SIGCOMM community. The program will fund projects up to a total of $50,000 per year for the next two years.
The type of project proposal we expect to fund is something that befits our mission and scale. It should have benefits for the SIGCOMM community as a whole. The proposal should also be one that would not be likely to attract funding from elsewhere (e.g. NSF, DARPA, the proposers institute, etc), perhaps because it is too infrastructural, or not research-minded enough, or even because it is too much so, or else has a community of interest that is not a good fit for those agencies, but is for SIGCOMM.
Project proposals should be emailed to the executive commitee (or any member thereof) by the proposer, with any supporting material the submitter deems reasonable.
The project proposal should include
We have two categories of project and procedure (this is commensurate with risk, as well as opportunity and speed of response, as per our mission).
For Under $5,000, the SIGCOMM executive committee will respond within 2 months with a simple yes or no, togerther with a brief review of our reasons.
Over $5,000, the ACM SIGCOMM executive committee will seek advice from 2 members of the SIG and guarantee to respond within 6 months at worse (although we expect to be quicker). The reviews will be anonymous and returned to the proposer togerther with the executive committee's reasons.
While subject to ACM approval, the decision of the SIGCOMM executive committee is final.
Network Bibliography Project,
October 1996, Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University, $5,000.
Abstract: Provide for the expansion and maintenance of the Network Bibliography Project. See http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/netbib/
Internet Engineering Curriculum,
1996-97, 1 year, Dr. K. Claffy, National Laboratory for Advanced Networking
Research, $5,000.
Abstract: The National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) has proposes to coordinate and make available on the web a distributed ``living curriculum'' in network engineering. Our resources are the current teachers, and our objective is to help them draw together the myriad topics and integrate them into a continually changing online curriculum, a resource for both teachers and students. A central trove of multimedia minicourses, containing problem sets and real, online projects, can speed the development of the required engineering talent. It can be instrumental, ultimately, in creating a stable network infrastructure whose reliability and throughput at various levels will be secured by the activities of engineers, users, and service providers alike.
We have submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation, but the community has expressed such vehement interest in this site that we now wished we had proposed the effort sooner, since NSF review cycles take 6 months to a year. If we had additional funding to carry us through to the review, we could afford to dedicate a part-time staff member to getting a working prototype up before the 1996-97 school year begins (we would shoot for 1 August 1996).
Internet Traffic Archive,
February 1997, Vern Paxson, $1,000?
Abstract: Purchase 1GB disk for storage of the Internet Traffic Archive. Lost support of previous site. Needs quick turnaround. See http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/ITA/
ACM Networking Course Curricula,
September 1997, Craig Partridge, $200
Abstract: Provide funds for teleconferences to discuss course curricula on networking at undergraduate and graduate levels.