“ Identi fy the Champion ”

The peer review process for technical contributions to conferences in computing sciences is very thorough, and can be as stringent as the review process for journal publications in other domains. The programme committee for such a conference will typically convene at a meeting, where submitted papers are discussed, and accepted or rejected for presentation at the conference. Experience shows that discussions are more focussed, and the entire process runs more smoothly if most of the time is devoted to those papers that are actually “championed” by some committee member. In order to make this work effectively, however, the notion of “championing” must be introduced early in the review process. This paper presents a set of process patterns that help to achieve this goal.