The responsibilities included as part of being the TCCC Representative at YOUR_CONFERENCE are:

• Attend scheduled TPC meetings when and where they take place.
• Take as active a role as possible in promoting topics of interest to TCCC in the context of YOUR_CONFERENCE. This can typically consists of:
  • Proposed "hot topics" for panels and/or special sessions as well as tutorials.
  • Identify qualified "experts" and enroll their participation to help promote quality panels, special sessions, and tutorials on topics of interest to TCCC.
  • Actively solicit good papers in areas of relevance to TCCC, especially emerging ones.
  • Handling of paper submissions and general TPC member responsibilities. The first and maybe most important aspect is to ensure that all papers submitted to YOUR_CONFERENCE and on topics of relevance to TCCC are properly routed to you. The first step is to make sure that the call for papers clearly identifies that authors should indicate a general area for their paper, and that TCCC is explicitly listed as one of the candidate areas. However, this is typically not enough and papers often get misrouted to other committees, either because the authors forgot to list an area, or because of some error. It is, therefore, important to closely track any potential candidate paper and regularly review the list of papers assigned to other areas. Conversely, if you get papers which are clearly outside the scope of TCCC, you should forward them to the appropriate TPC for that area. In the case of papers that can fit in multiple areas, the best way to handle such situations and avoid frictions, is to suggest joint sessions with other committees. This may be the case for areas such as wireless, multimedia, etc.
  • Identify suitable reviewers for all the papers you have been assigned. We can certainly help you with that process and suggest names, but you are also encouraged to draw on your own circle of colleagues as this helps broaden the reviewers' population we need to tap in. Obviously, this should be done with quality as the main criterion.
  • Participate in the paper acceptance process to ensure that TCCC papers are of high quality, but also are not penalized by a review process more stringent than that used by other TPCs. Ideally, you want to have many accepted high quality papers, but the situation is often not that simple and you will have to exercise your judgement to decide which ones to push during the final phases of the TPC review process. A "good" general rule is that you may want to promote more strongly papers that are in new emerging areas we are trying to grow, than those that are in more mature areas. If in doubt about the importance of a particular topic, feel free to consult any of the TCCC officers. Also, as a rule, having pre-identified sessions with their titles and all the accepted papers in each of them, can be very helpful in ensuring that you get the kind of coverage and acceptance rate you seek. In general, the better prepared you are in figuring out where each paper should go, the better your chance of success.
  • Session organization is the last but nevertheless important step of the paper handling process. As mentioned above, the ideal situation is when you have been able to group all your "accepted" papers (those you want to recommend for acceptance), into full sessions. In practice, you may not be able to do that for all your papers, and you have then to figure out how to handle them. One option mentioned earlier is that of joint sessions with other committees, and again you can maximize your chances of success there by trying to arrange that ahead of time. In general, the goal is to ensure that TCCC is well represented in terms of number of accepted papers and coverage of its sessions.

You may want to also contact some of the TCCC conf reps for other conferences and ask them to share their experience with you. This may give you a more practical idea on how things happen. Their names and how to contact them are listed on the TCCC web page.