IEEE Communications Society provides support to various conferences and workshops. A conference or workshop first identifies a technical committee (or committees) which shares the same technical interests and asks the technical committee's support. The technical committee then recommends support to the IEEE Communications Society based on its guidelines, and the Comunications Society makes the decision. No workshop or conferences will be sponsored or co-sponsored unless there is endorsement from one or more TCs.

There are two types of support that IEEE Communications Society provides:

sponsorship support (financial)

IEEE Communications Society has financial obligations. If a conference makes a profit, IEEE keeps it. If a conference looses money, IEEE pays for the loss. The conference can use IEEE Communications Society's name for publicity. (Technical committee's name will not appear anywhere. In other words, it is not TCCC that supports the conference; it is IEEE.) For financial sponsorship, after the TC concurs, the TAC chair (currently, Nim Cheung) will forward the request to the Meetings and Conference Department (now chaired by Doug Zuckerman) to examine the financial condition before giving it the final approval.

in co-operation support (non-financial, technical):

IEEE Communications Society does not have any financial obligation. The conference can use IEEE Communications Society's name (not the name of technical committee) for publicity. Only TC endorsement is needed.

A technical committee makes a recommendation to the IEEE Communications Society, and the IEEE Communications Society makes its own decision based on the technical committee's recommendation.

In both cases, the TAC chair will forward the request to Tom Stevenson of IEEE New York office. He will provide a form for the TC or its partner to complete. From then on, he or his colleagues will take care of a lot of your administrative chores, e.g. logo, advertising, etc. This will relieve quite a bit of your burden so that the TCs can focus on the technical matters.

The Chair of the Technical Committee writes a supporting letter and sends it to the conference requesting support. The Conference submits the letter to the IEEE Communications Society office along with other required documents and forms (such as call for papers, budget, conference organizer/officer list, date, location, etc.). IEEE has specific forms that the conference needs to fill to request support.

Workshop and conferences can receive support even though they are classified (such as parts of Milcom) or receive support from private sponsors (such as ACM Sigcomm).

It is acceptable for a TC to co-sponsor an event with a Society such as ACM or ISOC. It will appear as a joint event by ComSoc and ACM (or ISOC).

IEEE sponsored conferences (thus, the conferences requesting IEEE's support, when the support is granted) are required to submit the budget and follow specific sets of rules.