The standing of a conference is determined by the community, and maintaining a positive opinion by the community is paramount to ensuring the long-term success of ICST. This is why the charter explicitly dis-allows conference program and general chairs from submitting or being co-authors on submitted papers—such a submission would represent an inherent and unavoidable conflict of interest.

Generally speaking, a conflict of interest occurs whenever an individual is not able to provide an objective, unbiased, review of another's work. Note that a conflict could be positive (we really hope that person succeeds) or negative (we really hope that person does not succeed). ICST conference organizers, technical program committee members and reviewers are on their honor to declare any conflict of interest they have. Particular examples of conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Supervisor or sub-ordinate within the past 5 years.
• Ph.D. advisor or student, always.
• Co-author, co-investigator, or business partner in the past 5 years.
• Current employer, or negotiations of employment.
• Bitter enemy or great friend.

• Submissions to ICST cannot be submitted in parallel to any other conference or journal.
• Technical program committee members and reviewers should treat all submissions and reviews as privileged and confidential. They may not discuss material outside of the committee meetings and may not use ideas from a submitted paper until and unless the paper is accepted and published either at ICST or another outlet. Submitted papers and reviews may never be distributed beyond conference organizers and reviewers.
• Reviewers are expected to provide reviews that are thorough, fair, unbiased, objective, and respectful. Reviews that are excessively short or biased are unacceptable and reviewers who provide such reviews should not be asked to review ICST papers in future years.
• At least one of the authors of an accepted paper is expected to attend the conference and present the paper. Otherwise, future submissions from the authors will be administratively rejected without review. If an emergency arises, the contact author is expected to notify the program chair as soon as reasonably possible.