1- This was 2008 and the guy's retired by now.

2- Outside of engineering (or at least in the Chemistry/Bio field where I came from), conference submissions are abstracts not papers. There may sometimes be special issues where speakers are invited to submit a paper after the fact. But "paper" here means drafting the full manuscript and submitting it to the publisher when you're ready to be published in a future issue. So no steering committee, just an Editor-in-Chief who conducts research in the field. In fact referencing conference abstracts was always frowned upon because they never contained enough information to be properly scrutinized.

Speaking of, this whole "reputable papers only happen with conferences" phenomenon was unheard of to me until I joined an engineering company