Discrimination and harassment are not to be tolerated within our community. All SIGCOMM events and communications (emails, online social network groups, etc.) must abide by ACM’s policies: policy against discrimination and harassment, policy on plagiarism, misrepresentation, and falsification; policy on coercion and abuse in the ACM publications process; and policy on roles and responsibilities in ACM publishing. If a violation of any of these occur, ACM urges reporting the incident to the event chairs or to ACM leadership, as indicated on those webpages. SIGCOMM recognizes that reporting to the conference chairs or an upper-level ACM administrator can be intimidating, especially in the face of an already traumatic experience.

The SIGCOMM CARES Committee (SIGCOMM Committee to Aid REporting on discrimination and haraSsment policy violations) is intended to assist members of our community who may have experienced or witnessed behaviors that violate the ACM policy against discrimination and harassment in relation to an event or publication sponsored by the SIG, as a step forward to prevent and address any forms of unacceptable behavior in the context of our sponsored conferences. It was created following ACM SIGARCH initiatives and leveraging the experience with an ad hoc committee in SIGCOMM 2018. Note that despite CARES, for the matter to be reported, the person experiencing the incident must still themselves submit the complaint to ACM, where it will be handled according to ACM’s policy.

When physically attending an event in their capacity as CARES members, individuals will wear a badge that clearly identifies them as such. They can also be contacted online to facilitate and schedule initial discussions.

Committee (Contact: cares@sigcomm.org):

• Co-Chair: Ethan Katz-Bassett (Columbia University), ethan@ee.columbia.edu

• Co-Chair: Shir Landau Feibish (Open University of Israel), shirlf@openu.ac.il

• Nate Foster (Cornell University), jnfoster@cs.cornell.edu

• Xiaowei Yang (Duke University), xiaowei.yang@duke.edu

• Renata Teixeira (Netflix), rteixeira@netflix.com 

Nominating members for SIGCOMM CARES
The SIGCOMM CARES Committee is intended to assist members of our community who may have experienced or witnessed behaviors that violate the ACM policy against discrimination and harassment, as well as ACM policies around paper review and publication. The committee would like to add 2+ new members for a 3-4 year term (we’ll discuss exact term limits as a committee once new members join). To help the committee serve the community as a whole, we encourage diversity in nominees along many dimensions.

• You are welcome to use this form to nominate yourself and/or others.

• If you are nominating someone else, please reach out to the nominee to encourage them to also self-nominate, but if they do not we will reach out to candidates under consideration.

• If you are nominating yourself, you are welcome to ask 0-2 others to also recommend you via the same form.

• Nominations are open until September 30. 

Please direct any questions or comments to cares@sigcomm.org. We look forward to your nominations!

 
SIGCOMM CARES Recommendations document in response to HotNets incident (December 2020)
In September 2020, the SIGCOMM CARES committee was made aware of a situation that arose in the HotNets 2020 review process. SIGCOMM CARES received two complaints, one sent by all three authors and one from the lead author alone. The incident was discussed in the committee and multiple parties involved were consulted, leading to a list of 7 recommendations. The implementation of these recommendations by the different actors responsible for overseeing the review process, namely ACM, SIGCOMM and Conference Steering Committees, PC chairs, PC committees and the CARES Committee, will hopefully help prevent similar incidents in the future. 

• Document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cFP9uECiWruG71wExssznx3mmuoaBDni/view

SIGCOMM CARES Community Meetings
CARES planned two community meetings in April 2021 to communicate and clarify its role. These meetings are intended to serve as both information sessions on CARES and a means to foster discussion on how CARES and ACM might evolve to better serve the community as well as a forum to answer questions that community members may have.
1st Meeting -- Friday, April 2, from 2pm ET

• Meeting Recording:https://acm-org.zoom.us/rec/share/3QgWaGDgw05hohM15-fMUMITKmpUJ5te4cHlL_Vk-BgjHz7h_WF9nsOSBmalwqEC.kmyRndmwv7P1ptTS

• Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FTXPcYzvnMfX8QhwnTvzYeMt9Qzsebhb/view?usp=sharing

2nd Meeting -- Friday, April 23, at 9am ET

• Meeting Room (zoom webinar): https://acm-org.zoom.us/j/93830617137?pwd=U3VJd09QOVhHKzA3U3BWbEl2YjRaQT09