Een Frahns, zey do not drink ze SODA.

On Lance and Bill's blog, David Johnson surprises exactly no one:

SODA 2011 will be in San Francisco. SIAM cannot on their own run a conference outside of North America, but needs a local organizer. We could not find anyone to host the conference in Paris proper. The best we could do was a suburban location, which I do not think would have counted as "Paris" even to the voters. So in the future, proposals for European locations will not be considered at Business Meetings unless they are made by people prepared to act as local organizers (as is done with STOC and FOCS).

Just as well, I suppose. SOCG 2011 will be in Paris, in the Latin Quarter no less, and who needs to go to Paris twice in one year? And it's not like there are any algorithms researchers in Europe, anyway. (Well, except for all those computational geometers, but they have their own conference.)

All snarkiness aside, I am curious why SIAM is unable to organize conferences outside North America. I don't see anything about a North American restriction in SIAM's bylaws [pdf] or in their conference organization guidelines. (SIAM does offer more funds for invited speakers traveling from outside North America, which suggests an implicit assumption about location.) And while the majority of SIAM's membership is North American, they do have a significant presence in Europe and Asia as well [pdf; see slide 2].

More importantly, I hope this means that SODA will move toward a local organization model, like every other theory conference, instead of relying on SIAM he said comfortably from his corn-encrusted ivory tower deep in the snowy midwest.

Comments

[D. Eppstein]

Sigh. We should be building bridges across the Atlantic, not barriers. Poking one timid toe out the door and then immediately running back to the safest and most frequent choice for the conference location is not a great way of doing that.

The relatively small number of people with European affiliations on this year's program committee is also a symptom of the same parochiality, I think. I've heard complaints that SODA acceptances are politically biased against non-Americans; I don't believe any conscious bias of that type exists but there could well be an unconscious bias due to less familiarity with some topics.

You were being tongue-in-cheek about the "except for all those computational geometers" part, I'm sure, but I think the many attendees of ESA/ALGO, ICALP, WG, SWAT, etc., would object to the implication that there is no broad European non-geometric algorithms community.

[Jeff Erickson]

Of course I was being tongue in cheek there as well.

Do you think we can convince SIAM to organize SODA in Guanajuato in 2012 (like WAFR 2008)?

Me neither.

[Mikael Vejdemo Johansson]

What kind of a suburban Paris location did they come up with? Orsay is quite lovely, and breathes heavy of university atmosphere; and the Cité des Sciences is, while arguably not in the core of Paris, still a gorgeous place to potentially host conferences...

It makes me wonder what sort of organizers they were hoping for in "Paris propre"? ENS? Sorbonne? The interesting things, as far as I can tell from my remote location, in Paris CS happen outside the walking distance from the Pantheon circle.

[D. Eppstein]

Hey! This isn't Paris!