The PODC Steering Committee announces that the 13th PODC conference will be held in St. John's, Newfoundland, marking the first time since 1995. The General Chair is Soma Chaudhuri, and Krishnamurthy Vidyasankar will serve as Local Arrangements Chair. A tentative offer to host PODC 2005 in Europe has been received, with the possibility of holding the conference elsewhere being discussed at the 2002 Business Meeting. Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch present a note on Brewer's conjecture regarding the feasibility of consistent, available, and partition-tolerant web services. They prove that it is impossible to achieve all three properties in an asynchronous network model and discuss solutions in a partially synchronous model. The paper defines atomic data objects, available data objects, and partition tolerance, and provides formal proofs for the impossibility of achieving all three properties. Solutions in the asynchronous and partially synchronous models are explored, including atomicity with partition tolerance, atomicity with availability, and availability with partition tolerance. The paper also introduces a weaker consistency condition, *t*-Connected Consistency, which allows for stale data under certain conditions. The authors conclude that while achieving all three properties is impossible, achieving any two of them is feasible, and future research should focus on practical compromises between consistency and availability.The PODC Steering Committee announces that the 13th PODC conference will be held in St. John's, Newfoundland, marking the first time since 1995. The General Chair is Soma Chaudhuri, and Krishnamurthy Vidyasankar will serve as Local Arrangements Chair. A tentative offer to host PODC 2005 in Europe has been received, with the possibility of holding the conference elsewhere being discussed at the 2002 Business Meeting. Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch present a note on Brewer's conjecture regarding the feasibility of consistent, available, and partition-tolerant web services. They prove that it is impossible to achieve all three properties in an asynchronous network model and discuss solutions in a partially synchronous model. The paper defines atomic data objects, available data objects, and partition tolerance, and provides formal proofs for the impossibility of achieving all three properties. Solutions in the asynchronous and partially synchronous models are explored, including atomicity with partition tolerance, atomicity with availability, and availability with partition tolerance. The paper also introduces a weaker consistency condition, *t*-Connected Consistency, which allows for stale data under certain conditions. The authors conclude that while achieving all three properties is impossible, achieving any two of them is feasible, and future research should focus on practical compromises between consistency and availability.