Technical program overview

This is my opportunity to write a few lines, read by perhaps very few, about some really boring statistics. First, I would like to bring up an issue that deserves some thought. Between ACC, CDC and IFAC (or ECC, MSC, etc.) we write and review over 5,000 conference papers a year, this year a lot more! We seek at least two reviews per paper (done in less than a month), and increasingly demand little to no overlap with other conference and/or journal submissions. Naturally, we have developed an army of volunteers (see the numbers below), to handle all this. Is this sustainable? After thousands of reviews (which needed millions of reminders), we get something resembling a 3,000 page version of IEEE Trans. on …., which of course it is not - nor it is meant to be. Should we expect something different, and more, from such a huge effort?