What Ought a Program Committee to Do?

When the Internet was initially constructed it was a defacto playground for researchers. The research community built the Internet and refined it by monitoring traffic and tinkering with protocols and applications. The days of the Internet being a research sandbox are clearly over. Today, society at-large depends on the Internet as a crucial piece of infrastructure for communication and commerce. As such, experimenting with and monitoring today’s Internet is a much more thorny endeavor than in the past because researchers must consider the impact of their experiments on users. The community has started to face questions about the propriety of certain experiments and will no doubt continue to struggle with such issues going forward. In this note, we ponder the role of a program committee when faced with submissions that involve a potentially unacceptable experimental methodology. We note that the community already charges program committees with dealing with a number of ethical issues such as plagiarism, simultaneous submissions and conflicts of interest. Should dealing with questions about the ethics of a particular experimental methodology also be on the PC’s plate? Certainly we are aware of PCs that have taken it upon themselves to include such issues in the debate over particular submissions. Are such considerations “in bounds” for PC consideration? Or, should PCs stick to the technical aspects of submissions? To give the reader a concrete flavor of the sorts of questions that might arise during PC deliberations we sketch possible reactions to several recently published paper as examples.