feature request: ability to hide review assignment until finalized

[dants]

[I speculate I'm not the only one that requested this but can't find a related issue]

The process of assigning reviews is often iterative and may take a few days, during which reviewers are able to see assignments despite the fact they're subject to (sometime significant) change. The chairs must therefore either spam everyone by mailing a message saying "assignment isn't final, and we will tell you when it is"; or they should repeatedly reply in private to confused reviewers that ask via email if they can start reviewing.

It would therefore be helpful to have a per-round 'make review assignment visible' option.

[fdouglis]

I fully agree with this as a useful feature.

I don't know how common it is to take as long as ATC'19 did in juggling assignments, but I think as conferences and committees get bigger, this complexity means either spending a lot of time getting it right or going quickly but getting it somewhat wrong. I'm really appreciative that at the end of the ATC'19 process, I had gotten a very good number of the papers I really wanted to review, but for much of the time these were exposed, it looked otherwise. But what would have been helpful then would be to have assignments rolled out in phases. If no more than N people placed their top bid on a given paper, then presumably those people will get to review it regardless of how things shuffle down the list. So if I could have been assured that yes, my #1 choice would be sticky, I could have started my reviewing in the first day or two instead of several days later.

So "make assignment visible" is presumably trivial and super-useful. "Release an assignment per person" is less trivial but IMHO still fairly useful. And no, I'm neither paying for nor implementing it, so I know to temper my expectations!

[tzimmermsr]

+1 for this feature request.

[avandeursen]

For ICSE 2021 it was a surprise to me that our attempts at creating the assignment could be followed by the full PC. It would be great if the assignment would be in a "draft" and invisible status until explicitly released by the chairs. Thanks!!