This letter was used as a suggested template for the one Shepherds use to introduce themselves to their authors and to introduce the shepherding process. Also see Shepherd Letter Bobby and Shepherd Letter David.

Dear PLoP Submitter:

Thank you for taking the risk of submitting your work to PLoP '98. We hope that your experience of having your paper reviewed for PLoP will be different from your experience with other conferences or publications. I have been assigned to your paper as a "shepherd". I have two primary responsibilities:

  1. Helping you improve your submission
  2. Voting whether your submission meets PLoP's criteria for being
     workshoped at the conference

Both activities go hand in hand. We're going to have several iterations over your paper where my job is to suggest you changes for improvement. Of course, it's your own decision, whether you'd like to incorporate the changes or not. However, experience shows that most remarks lead to some changes in the document--future readers will have more benefit from a clarification in the document than I will have if you explain the topic to me only. We have eigth weeks to work on the paper. We should use this time as well as we can.

During this shepherding, I collaborate with a member of the program committee. That person's job is to support me if I feel the need for a second vote. Please CC the program committee member on every mail you send to me.

Please make sure that our e-mail connection works. We're going to have a lot of traffic and a broken e-mail connection is about the worst things that can happen during this project.

After the shepherding period, I'm going to send the latest version of your paper (the "version for voting") to the program committee together with my vote on whether the paper is suitable for participation ion a writers' workshop.

However, my vote is not the only one. A second member of the program committee will vote on the version for vote independently from my vote. Depending on both votes the chairs will finally decide for acceptance. If your paper is accepted you have time to prepare the version that is going to be workshoped at the conference.

This may seem quite complicated, but I'll support you to track the dates and take care that you don't miss any deadline.

Please consult the shepherding guidelines page:

    http://st-www.cs.uiuc.ed ... shepherding.html

for more information on the shepherding process.

contents of this page originally posted on www.c2.com