IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture^®

To all those who attended the MICRO business meeting diversity discussion and/or have followed it on this blog/twitter, we wanted to provide an update to the MICRO and broader computer architecture communities as to the next steps.

First off, we want to thank everyone who participated in the diversity discussion and expressed their thoughts. It was by far the largest crowd that has ever attended a MICRO business meeting! More importantly, the discussion was both productive and insightful. Not only did MICRO regulars speak up, but the discussion was joined by a good number of students, which made it all the more useful.

We take the discussion and need to take action very seriously.  Here is a list of the initial steps that will be taken.  Note that this list is intentionally incomplete.  New steps will be added as these complete and provide new action items.

1. Post business meeting slides and diversity discussion notes.
   Target: Nov 2017
   Status:  Complete and available:
   https://www.microarch.org/businessmtg/micro50/micro2017-business_meeting-final.pdf, https://www.microarch.org/businessmtg/micro50/micro2017-business_meeting_notes.pdf
2. Create and distribute survey for the community to collect ideas on how to enhance diversity and inclusion in MICRO.
   Target: Survey out Dec 2017, Survey complete Jan 31, 2018
   Status: In progress.  A draft survey is available and we are in the process of soliciting feedback to refine.
3. Analysis of diversity survey results
   Target: Spring 2018, post summary of survey and action items
   Status: Not started
4. Form new MICRO Steering Committee in consultation with sponsoring organizations
   Target: January-February  2018
   Status: In progress
5. Complete discussions with MICRO sponsoring organizations on guiding principles for conference governance
   Target: February-March 2018
   Status: Initial discussion with SIGMICRO and TCuarch Executive Committees held Nov 17, 2017

We invite feedback from the community, so if you have have any comments or suggestions, please follow up with public comments on the blog itself or via email at [email protected].  Thanks in advance for your feedback.