
Yet Another Welcome: ACM SIGSOFT

As chair of ACM SIGSOFT, it is my greatest pleasure to welcome you to ICSE 2001! Hausi Müller, Mary Jean Harrold, Wilhelm Schäfer — and a cast of hundreds — have put together a fantastic program in a fantastic location: on behalf of SIGSOFT, I applaud their many years of hard work in bringing ICSE to Canada for the very first time. Make sure to pass your own thanks on to the ICSE 2001 team when you get a chance.
If I’m not mistaken, this is the seventh year of WOW: Michael Gorlick had the original idea, which Will Tracz implemented, at ICSE 1995 in Seattle. At meetings of the ACM SIG chairs I’ve talked several times about WOW, and their response has been wildly positive. I don’t know if any of the SIGs have started their own version of WOW, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some clones in the near future.  So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the WOW volunteers (past and, of course, present!): they probably get less sleep than anybody else at ICSE, since they burn the midnight oil in getting WOW laid out, printed, and distributed.
ICSE is intended to be a melting pot of software engineering educators, practitioners, and researchers.  I urge you to reach out and make this a reality of ICSE instead of merely a good intention: go to some sessions you wouldn’t normally go to and mingle with some people you don’t know. You’ll take much more home that way, and ICSE will benefit enormously as well.
Enjoy the conference and don’t forget to brush up on your Spanish so you can better enjoy ICSE 2002 in Buenos Aires next May!

David Notkin
