[TYPES/announce] Two phase reviewing for POPL; a response

[Andrew Myers]

The current two-phase proposal sounds to me as if it will significantly 
increase the amount of reviewing work without significantly increasing 
the quality of the reviewing process, for the reasons Derek has argued.

Why not look at the approaches other communities have taken? Several 
major conferences in the networking, systems and security communities 
have changed to a different two- or three-phase reviewing process in 
which papers are rejected early in the process if they have enough 
confident negative reviews. Only the best papers and papers with low 
confidence continue on. I've seen this both as a PC member and as a PC 
chair, and in my experience, it's great. The reviewing load is increased 
only slightly, and both the quality of the reviews and the quality of 
the decision process is improved. It's also more fun and educational to 
be a PC member, because the average quality of the papers you review is 
higher. And the accepted papers get more reviews, which also improves 
the product.

I believe Tom Anderson first introduced this idea for SIGCOMM 2006; I 
have more detailed notes on how this worked for IEEE Security and 
Privacy (Oakland) 2009.

Cheers,

-- Andrew