You know what, I agree. Confidentiality wins here because of the process needs of the academic community.

It’s fabulous that WikiSym is in a position to reveal such large amounts of quality cutting-edge research and we have the accolade of reviewers to ensure quality right. For details, I just have to wait.

* Ward Cunningham (invented wikis)
* Dan Bricklin (invented spreadsheets)
* Scott Rosenberg (invented Salon)
* Thomas Burg (invented BlogTalk)

We’ve got George Landow, who wrote the first paper on hypertext rhetoric, and Cathy Marshall, who started spatial hypertext.

Perhaps you can give us a teaser though, Mark: what subject areas are covered and do we have more big name firms involved in the Paper track.?

In scientific conferences, research submissions are confidential until the paper is either published or rejected. Confidentiality is important for many reasons and has many facets.

Being the first to publish a result, for example, may have very real consequences: I have a colleague who lost TWO separate dissertation topics when other mathematicians discovered and published his result before he could complete his thesis.

For more on how program committees operate: http://www.markbernstein.org/May0801/WikiSymPlanning.html

The system evolved in this way to encourage people to publish; the dissemination of knowledge is the core value in play here, and in this case it trumps transparency.