… is one of the most important decisions for that year of the conference, and beyond that. Criteria should include:
- technical competence and standing in the community
- close familiarity and identification with the conference
- experience in chairing conference committees
- willingness and ability to implement the guiding principles of the conference
- organizational skills and discipline – organizing the reviewing process and in particular the TPC meeting are fairly complex undertaking, full of pitfalls and easy to make mistakes which can have major consequences
- social skills – much of the work of the TPC chair deals with steering TPC members, a group of very smart, busy, experienced, often passionate and opinionated persons; TPC procedures have to deal with how people really are and act, not how we think they should; great ideas to handle the evaluation process not taking this into account, e.g., by not being flexible or too optimistic, will fail
- readiness to propose and discuss new ideas to improve conference processes
- good and open work relations with the technical committee, as eg established by chairing other events at conference, e.g., workshops