2024 USENIX Annual Meeting Report

USENIX held its annual membership meeting on Monday, December 16, 2024, via Zoom. This report summarizes the topics covered by the Board of Directors and staff during the meeting.

Membership and Financial Sustainability

This year has continued to be financially challenging for USENIX. We are in a slightly better position this year (less in the “red”) than last year, but we are still not in a sustainable position. This report includes more information about work that is ongoing to address this challenge.

Unfortunately, for a “member organization,” our membership has continued to decline. Membership in USENIX has decreased by 15% since this time last year so we are very appreciative of all the people who do continue to support USENIX through their membership and involvement.

Sponsorship, Fundraising, Grants, and USENIX’s 50th Anniversary

The USENIX Development team has expanded to better support more opportunities for fundraising in 2025, increasing outreach to major donors, grant providers and foundations, and adding new ways to give. In the past, USENIX revenue has been deeply reliant on conference sponsorship. This presents limitations as we look at unreliable future funding from corporations that are reducing event presence and recruitment. We hope to create a more diverse support structure that is able to offset the uncertainty inherent in corporate sponsorship funding. We are eager to form new alliances with your help for the long-term survival of USENIX. 

2025 is USENIX’s 50th year. To celebrate, we are launching a video oral history project about the many groundbreaking events in the computing world for which USENIX has been a catalyst or hub. If you have something to add to the oral history, please reach out to Simone Burden. We will mark the occasion at our 2025 conferences as well, and plan to hold an informal gathering in the Fall.

Sponsorship: 

We continue to face challenges in securing sponsorships, which have historically been the backbone of our funding, resulting in a negative impact to our bottom line. The fragmented tech landscape, marked by layoffs and restructuring in recent years, resulted in the loss of key contacts who championed conference sponsorships. Other negative financial impacts include a reduction in revenue from the SREcon events–our most significant and consistent sponsorship revenue source until recently. 

At the same time, we saw more reliable sponsor support for the USENIX Security Symposium. We’re also excited to add VehicleSec ’25 to the suite of security-focused conferences this coming August. Our Sponsorship Program Manager, Mo Moreno, is engaged with building new partnerships and collaborating with the rest of the team on increased organizational support. 

Fundraising: 

To offset the sponsorship trend, USENIX is integrating a more robust fundraising strategy to increase individual donations and institutional grants to diversify our support.

From Individuals: To bolster USENIX’s resilience and secure its financial future, USENIX welcomed Simone Burden as a Donor Engagement Manager in July. Simone has been working to let everyone in our community know what we need in order to survive and thrive, as well as to secure substantial gifts in 2025. This Fall, she expanded giving opportunities available to our supporters to include giving vehicles that provide tax advantages to them, including gifts of stock and from an IRA.  

From Institutions: Cathy Bergman, the Grant Program Manager, continues to secure U.S. National Science Foundation support for our systems research conferences, allowing us to provide a strong ongoing grant program for our student attendees. She is also actively seeking opportunities for USENIX to receive general operating support grant funding from private foundations. As Camille Mulligan retires from over two decades of dedicated service to USENIX in 2025, Cathy will also take over leadership of the team as Development Director.

Returning to our overall team goals for the coming year, we are reaching out to you. Our community members are our most valuable resource, and we ask your help in providing us with introductions, donations, sponsorship contacts in your workplace, and other suggestions you may have. In particular, your introductions to prospective donors and corporate contacts who can provide organizational support are critical to a sustainable financial model for USENIX. Please reach out to development@usenix.org.

Program Changes for 2025

USENIX Security Format

A year ago we announced a major change in format to the USENIX Security Symposium in response to growing challenges of scale. Beginning with the 2025 conference, we will be decoupling paper publication from paper presentation: not all papers will have full-length talk presentations at the conference. Earlier this year, the program co-chairs, Lujo Bauer and Giancarlo Pellegrino, in collaboration with the USENIX Security Steering Committee, released an RFC to the community regarding ideas about these format changes.

Following on feedback from that process, the program co-chairs released their CFP, which also includes changes such as reducing the submission cycles to two rather than three as well as other additions related to ethics and open science. They continue to collaborate with the Steering Committee and the USENIX team on developing the plan for the program format. This new format will feature full-length talks of some papers, including the Distinguished Papers, as well as some kind of presentation for all papers, which will likely focus on posters and lightning talks.

Posters within the program will also now be grouped by topic. This will not only create more focused networking opportunities but will also offer a more dynamic conference experience as opposed to the tradition of sitting and watching multiple talks back to back. We will announce more details of the format as it relates to paper presentations in the coming months. However, we can provide more information now about other aspects of the program.

USENIX Security has a well-loved tradition of invited talks that has not been viable for the past several years as the Symposium has expanded explosively to accommodate as many paper presentations as possible. With the format change we're introducing in 2025, we are also delighted to announce that Enigma will be returning in a small, focused way as the Enigma invited talks track. The call for talk submissions for this track, which is being organized by members of the Enigma Steering Committee, will be available soon.

SOUPS, WOOT, and VehicleSec

SOUPS and WOOT are well-established conferences that are both co-located with USENIX Security. This year, we had a great program at both conferences, with many attendees and great feedback from the audience. We are looking forward to continuing to host these conferences alongside USENIX Security as they nicely complement the scope of the symposium.     

Next year, USENIX welcomes—for the first time—the VehicleSec Symposium, formerly co-located with NDSS, as a co-located event with USENIX Security. We are excited to collaborate with this growing community of researchers and practitioners in support of vehicle security and privacy. VehicleSec initially started as a workshop based on an existing community, but then grew into a full conference with more attendees and several sponsors from industry that support the program. Given that the conference is expected to grow even more in size, we think that VehicleSec is an ideal event to organize alongside the USENIX Security Symposium. Together with SOUPS and WOOT, we think that VehicleSec is a great addition to USENIX Security and we expect many synergy effects. The Call for Papers is now available.

NSDI and OSDI Scope

The steering committees of both NSDI and OSDI have decided to tighten the scopes of their conferences as both symposia have seen an increase over time in submissions that do not reflect the core interests and expertise of their communities.

The NSDI steering committee released a statement summarizing their efforts in this regard, which were implemented by the NSDI '25 program co-chairs in their CFP. As noted in the statement, the Steering Committee will evaluate the impact of this change and adjust its recommendations to future program co-chairs as necessary, while maintaining its dedication to this goal for the good of the NSDI community.

The OSDI '25 CFP also reflects the steering committee and program co-chairs collaboration in this regard.

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Rik Farrow has continued his usual excellent work in 2024: ;login: online has published steadily, with 25 articles year to date. We generally have over 40,000 article downloads per month, significantly above levels the previous year. While newer articles generally garner more downloads, many older articles still receive a steady stream of downloads. 

However, all good things must come to an end and ;login: is no exception. What it comes down to is that Rik is more or less irreplaceable as a technical writer and editor who is deeply familiar with USENIX and the subject-areas of most of our conferences. He has been the editor of ;login: since 2005, having also contributed prior to that. His eventual retirement is something that USENIX leadership has been aware of for some years, realizing it would necessitate changes of some kind. At the same time, COVID brought a number of other changes, including ;login:’s move to an exclusively online publication.

Moving online made a lot of sense at the time, and has been successful in many respects: content is easier to access, and the environmental and financial cost of printing and mailing thousands of printed paper issues has been removed. However, it also has made finding content harder: we no longer have editions, so we no longer have columnists; and, for authors, there is not the incentive of being published in a “real” magazine. Add to that the pressure that many industry participants are feeling at work at present, and sourcing quality content becomes difficult, perhaps unsustainable. 

Times have changed on the consumer side as well. When ;login: was originally introduced, a major aim was to reach an audience wider than those who attend the USENIX conferences, and many articles have been based on conference papers or talks. Since 2013, USENIX has been recording almost all presentations and making them all via open access. People can now easily access those recordings, so the need for an article version is lessened. The conference recordings fulfill a significant part of ;login:’s recent mission by providing a way to reach those who did not attend in person. 

So, ;login: will no longer publish new articles after 2025, giving us time to do a graceful shutdown, and work with authors who have in-progress articles. After that date, the ;login: article archive will remain freely available to all.

We offer our heartfelt thanks to Rik Farrow for his decades of work on behalf of USENIX. Board member Laura Nolan, in particular, has worked with him as a volunteer editor and has written a number of pieces that he has edited. Laura fondly recalls that he has always been professional, patient, and insightful. 

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Help us start the new year on strong financial footing: become a member or donate to USENIX, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Your support is critical to our ability to fulfill our mission, to bring communities together to engage with the latest research and practices in advanced computing systems, and to champion open access by ensuring that the research and content presented at our conferences is publicly available to all. With your support, USENIX  can thrive in 2025.