SIGCOMM Financial Report June 1995

Financial Summary: July 1, 1991 through June 30, 1995

SIGCOMM is in a healthy financial situation with a fund balance that has grown 58% from $222K in July 1991 to a projected $350K at the end of June 1995. The growth is attributable to the following actions of the SIGCOMM executive committee and conference volunteers:

• Adhere to ACM's three year policy, from July 1992 through June 1995, to not spend any of the fund balance.
• Avoid increasing SIGCOMM membership dues, which were last increased at the SIGCOMM 1989 business meeting.
• Increase the number of high quality tutorials aimed at both the SIGCOMM community and local networking professionals and students.
• Solicit corporate sponsorship of the annual SIGCOMM technical symposia in order to balance quality with costs.
• Cut expenses without impacting the membership (e.g., two ACM initiatives have lowered SIGCOMM's postage significantly).
• Budget for new SIGCOMM initiatives. (These ranged from seed money for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking to financial support for ACM networking lectures to online member benefits to membership drives. On the down side SIGCOMM and most other SIGs did cut back on their donations to some ACM-wide projects, paid for via the SIG Discretionary Fund.)

Starting July 1, 1995: ACM's "belt-tightening days" are behind us!

SIGCOMM's fiscal year 1996 (FY96) starts July 1, 1995 and ends June 30, 1996. Budget instructions from ACM to SIGCOMM for FY93 through FY95 have been "to operate on at least a break even basis, i.e. operating income covering operating expenses". Additionally, all SIGs were asked to not reduce their fund balances in order to build up the collective SIG and ACM fund balances. I am happy to report that the SIGs and ACM achieved their goals and the FY96 budget instructions allow SIGCOMM to spend up to $50K of its fund balance.

New Initiative: SIGCOMM Dues Reduction

The SIGCOMM FY96 budget plans on spending up to $39K of the fund balance. The most important part of the plan is a reduction in SIGCOMM dues to members of ACM. Student member dues are reduced from $15 to $12, and voting/associate member dues are reduced from $22 to $19, starting July 1, 1995.

Several other membership benefits are planned for FY96 as well; see the chairman's message for more information. These include:

• Tutorial Notes: Multimedia Conferencing on the Internet, by Van Jacobson, a member benefit mailed to all who subscribe or renew during calendar year 1995.
• Student travel grants.
• Subsidized subscriptions to some libraries.
• Infrastructure support for on-line access to SIGCOMM web pages.
• Contributions to the SIG Discretionary Fund.

THANKS!

As a member of the current SIGCOMM executive committee, I want to thank all of the volunteers that I have worked with over the last four years for their support and friendship. Working with SIGCOMM volunteers is incredibly rewarding, and I hope that you will have the opportunity to experience this as well!

Sincerely,
Chris C. Edmondson-Yurkanan
SIGCOMM secretary/treasurer 1991-1995