Letter from the new SIGMOD officers

Earlier this year, you elected new SIGMOD officers. We are humbled that you chose us and are looking forward to working with you. Firstly, we would like to thank our predecessors, Yannis Ioannidis, Christian Jensen, and Alex Labrinidis who have been running SIGMOD so smoothly in the last four years. They have done an amazing job, left a clean field behind, and we will try hard to follow their path and fit into their shoes. Secondly, we would like to ask you for your input, help, and continuous support. SIGMOD is run primarily by volunteers; some in formal roles, such as the executive committee and the organizers of the various conferences which are sponsored by SIGMOD. Ultimately, however, all your actions every day make a difference and make this community such a great place to be in. One area your immediate action is needed is in bridging with other disciplines. We live in exciting times and we believe that these times require particular efforts. Given the impressive growth and success of our community in the industrial and in the academic sectors, one may argue that we could lean back and relax because we have it all figured out. Our community has evangalized declarative programming, automatic optimization and parallelization, we have formalized concurrency and consistency, and we always strive to develop systems that scale with the data, the workload, and the number of machines. All of these innovations, as well as our general philosophy, become increasingly important in the Big Data era. Unfortunately, however, it is not sufficient to point to our old papers and trust that people will read them and implement our ideas. We need to become involved, adapt our ideas to the emerging aplications, and collaborate with other scientific communities and disciplines (within and outside of computer science) in order to have real impact. If we do not communicate, others will start to reinvent the wheel, making it increasingly difficult for us to even explain, let alone apply, our ideas. Another area in which we need your help is in improving the way our research community works. Ultimately, it must be fun to be a member of our community. Fortunately, there is a great deal of fun already, but there is also a great deal of frustration. There seems to be a general perception in almost all scientific disciplines (not only computer science or databases) that the reviewing and publishing system is broken. Globalization and the Internet have made it easier to do science and have accelerated innovation, but they have also put new challenges on all scientific communities. Our community can play a decisive role and become a model for other communities. We have strong conferences and great demographics with many young people with fresh ideas joining our community every year. Furthermore, we have an open-minded culture of experimenting with new ideas such as the reviewing and publishing scheme pioneered by PVLDB or the "repeatability of experiments" which has starte