I very strongly wish the answer to high service loads for marginalized folks in CS were to adequately reward disproportionate service efforts, not to just tell us we shouldn't be doing it.
I've gotten a lot of emails telling me that SIGPLAN-M was the highlight of someone's year, helped someone get into grad school, made someone feel like they belong in programming languages research, and so on. Imagine the academic impact of all of those researchers in the future.
Good DEI efforts and mentorship efforts and safety efforts and so on are like that---massive, massive improvements for the community for the people we help. But somehow they're treated as less relevant than our individual academic contributions.
Service is like an afterthought for tenure review. We have exactly one Distinguished Service Award through SIGPLAN, but every year it goes it someone who has been in the community for decades and decades. So the work goes to the people who care enough to do it for no reward.
What do we do to actually incentivize service efforts that really improve the community? To reward the people who care?
Like maybe companies can start organizing some unrestricted gifts for community leaders? Just to recognize our community leadership efforts, and the impact we have on the community as a whole?
Maybe rather than just a single mythical "Distinguished Service Award" for someone extremely senior, we can also have smaller annual recognition awards for folks who do a lot for the SIGPLAN community in any given year? And those can go out to a lot of people?
Like the @PLteaforplt organizers would all deserve that this past year, too. And so would some of the really amazing repeat student volunteers at conferences, the ones who are *always* there to help over and over again.
Tenure incentives. Who decides on those? The chair? Do I bug my chair about that?
Please post some of your ideas here.
I'll bring this up to the SIGPLAN Chair at some point during our conversation tomorrow, and probably also some industry contacts. And eventually the department head at Illinois.
Maybe CRA/CRA-WP too?
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Sigh, OK. I used VQGAN+CLIP in more of an auditing form this time, to see if the prompt "goyim" (the Hebrew and Yiddish word for non-Jews) generates a racist characature of a Jew. Unsurprisingly, it does
If there's any one thing I want folks to get out of the interview I recently did, it's the emotional impacts of ADHD, honestly, even if they weren't the main focus of the interview. I want you all to understand Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria
ND folks, so you have language for the intense bouts of despair you feel sometimes in response to personal criticism or rejection from people whose opinions you value, and know it's not weakness but a difference in how your brain works
NT folks, so you know that adapting communication norms for ND folks is a matter of diversity, not fragility or tone policing, even if they often look similar
Things I definitely don't care about: whether people in illegal settlements on Palestinian territories have to drive into Israel proper to buy a particular brand of ice cream
It's a Fun Opportunity for everyone to feel outraged about something though