How to organize CIG

When you run an annual conference series, it is important to maintain continuity and make sure that best practices live on from year to year. For many conferences, this seems to happen organically and/or imperfectly. For the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, we have a Games Technical Committee to oversee the conference, and a habit of always keeping a few people from previous years' conference organizing committee on the next year's committee. Now, we also have a set of of organizers' guidelines.

I took the initiative to formalize the rules we have informally and gradually agreed on for the conference back in 2014. I wrote a first draft, and then circulated it to all previous chairs of the conference, receiving much useful feedback. A number of people provided useful feedback, additions and/or edits of the text; among those who contributed substantially are Phil Hingston, Simon Lucas and Antonio Fernández Leiva (there are probably more, but I can't find them in the mail chain).

The complete guidelines can be found here, and also here. Please note that this is nothing like a final document with rules set in stone (and who would be to have the authority to do that anyway?). Rather, it's a starting point for future discussions about rules and practices. Our idea is that it can be very useful for future CIG organizers to have the way the conference has been organized written down in a single place. It could also be useful for people organizing other conferences, inside and outside AI and games.

While we're at it, I'd like to point out that I've also written about how to organize game-based AI competitions. This could be a useful resource for anyone who's into organizing competitions.