Text from the agenda or reports is indented and in typewriter font..
Numbered items refer to the numbers in the agenda.
Alpha-numeric designators, such as '1A' refer to items not on the original agenda
Postponed so that other items (see section II) deemed more pressing, because some attendees needed to leave the meeting early, could be considered. It was not, however, returned to.Motion: To accept the minutes.
Passed: by acclamation
&bull The Conference expectation and procedures should be fully conveyed to the persons running the conference: for example, the need to have conference evaluation forms.
&bull The biggest challenge was registration, and in particular, the fact that he had insufficient data on the numbers of attendees.
&bull The mailing lists were not up to date.
&bull The workshop registration was not on the main registration form. (The question was raised as to whether it should be on the main form. There was no clear consensus.)
&bull The number of students in the programming contest should be restricted to no more than 40. Although the Board does have policies in place to govern this matter, the problem, Paul related, was that he was attempting to be generous to the students and tried to accommodate more than could be conveniently handled.
CHAIR'S REPORT I. Report from National The past board meeting was held at SIGCSE, March 7-10 in Cincinnati (actually Covington, Ky). 1. The next national board meeting will be held November 9-10, 2007 at Coastal Carolina University. 2. National Partners Program. Microsoft would like to participate in CCSC conferences in ways other than being a vendor. Here are some of their suggestions. a. Providing keynote speakers on topics such as security or societal issues of computing. They promised such talks would not pitch their products. b. Conducting free pre-conference or post-conference workshops. c. Giving talks during the conference. d. Conducting student contests in conjunction with the conference similar to their ImagineCup contest. (http://imaginecup.com/) 3. Proceedings It was discussed at National whether it is necessary to provide paper copies of the Proceedings at the conference. Many conferences are moving to provide only a CD of the proceedings. Since our proceedings are already on the Web (in the ACM Digital Library) we certainly could do this. It would save time, money and effort. Besides not having to print the proceedings, we would have more flexibility with regard to deadlines on getting camera ready copies to John Meinke. The Board approved to not have paper proceedings at Fall conferences. 4. Paper deadlines Conferences still need to coordinate with John Meinke on the deadlines for camera ready submissions. 5. CCSC Regions The first meeting of the new Southern California region will take place April 4-5, 2008 at CalState-Northridge. 6. Travel Policy A uniform travel policy been approved for CCSC. This would cover reimbursement for the national board and for regional boards. The reimbursement form has not been finalized (and will not take effect until it is finalized), but here are the highlights of the policy. Note that the national policy doesn't have limits on Travel and Lodging costs, unlike current CCSCNE policy. Travel By car would be reimbursed at $.40/mile. Rental cars would be reimbursed if no reasonable transportation existed between the airport and meeting site. Hotels Reimbursed one night for each half day of meetings. Meals Reimbursed at the rate of $5 breakfast, $10 lunch, $20 dinner. II. Future Conferences 1 2008 Meeting Wagner College is the 2008 host. Dates of September 15 and January 12 have been proposed for our next board meetings at Wagner. 2. 2009 Meeting We need to finalize the host for the 2009 meeting. SUNY Plattsburgh has shown a great deal of interest in hosting this meeting. They have excellent facilities and I'm sure put on an excellent conference. The only issue is their distant location. Western New England College in Springfield has said that they would be interested in hosting in 2009. 3. Future Meetings Both SUNY Plattsburgh wants to host, it's just a question of when. University of Hartford has also indicated an interest in being a host.
&bull The National travel policy was in some matters more generous than our NE travel policy.&bull As regards item II-1 (the 08 Conference),
&bull Using a mileage rate of $0.40 seems less satisfactory than using that of the IRS. Larry will suggest to National that the IRS rate be used.
&bull Individual regions are to specify which persons are to be reimbursed for travel expenses.
&bull The meals rates of $5 breakfast, $10 lunch, $20 dinner seem too low. Larry will ask National to increase them.
&bull It was noted that the Conference Committee members should come to both meetings, Sept 15 and Jan 12.&bull It was reported that CCSCNE-07 had 238 attendees, 37 programming teams, and 27 posters.
&bull It was noted that that the conference itself will be held on the Friday/Saturday schedule as Wagner College does not have the staff to support a Saturday/Sunday conference.
&bull The was much, much discussion for quite some time regarding what the conference deadlines should be, but no actual deadlines were agreed to.
Passed: unanimously
In the discussion of the motion, it was observed, with neither
overt approval nor disapproval, that choosing Plattsburgh has the
consequence that CCSCNE will be held in NY state for three years in
a row.
&bull It was noted that 2010 will be the year of CCSCNE's fifteenth
anniversary. Ingrid remarked that it might be possible to
have CCSCNE-10 at the University of Hartford.
No additional comments were made.The Journal came together rather easily this year. John Meinke was appreciative of the fact we had all the due dates established well in advance, and all of our correspondence was quick and efficient. The length of the document was not an issue as it has been in the past, what with the poster abstracts not included this time. There were no major formatting issues of which I am aware, at least nothing more than the usual. Somewhat oddly, John uses WordPerfect, so some conversion issues will always arise. This year, we had two different copyright forms: the "standard" and the "self-hold" versions, the latter for tutorial and workshop authors/presenters. This seemed to go smoothly, except that I also received a number of forms from poster authors, which we decided was no longer needed. The fact that poster presenters need not send a copyright form should, perhaps, be made explicit on next year's Web page. I still have all of the 2007 copyright forms. John usually stores them, but because I did not go to SIGCSE this year, I could not transfer them to him. In any case, he would like them scanned so that he need store only the electronic copies. Scanning all of the forms is an arduous task, but I will try to accomplish this during the summer when student workers are in need of something to do. Respectfully submitted, Michael Gousie
No additional comments were made.Membership Chair's report After the lists.ccscne.org Majordomo server failed this winter, Amruth offered to set up a Mailman list server for us on his system. I took advantage of the offer and moved the main membership list to it. My initial impression is that the GNU Mailman program is much easier both to configure and to use than Majordomo was, and I recommend that we use it on any future CCSCNE server. I have not yet moved the department-chair lists to that server. We have no dump of the state of the lists, and so I would have to rebuild them from the original lists and the emailed updates that I've received and filed. I'd prefer to do this after we settle on a long-term solution to the server problem. The only use of our mailing list for a purpose other than conference-related notices was for a call to participate in an NSF-sponsored workshop on CS education, which Jim Kurose at UMass asked us to send. Jim reported that our mailing led to several responses by people interested in taking part in the workshop, and I have received no objections to that mailing. I think it would be appropriate to continue to allow such occasional use of our list, and to handle requests for it by email sent to the board, as we did this time. Respectfully submitted, David Hemmendinger membership chair 24 March 2007
CCSCNE Webmaster's Report
Changing Hosting Companies
Our current hosting company had some major problems this past year. These problems included:
- Changing their directory structure which broke many parts of our website, necessitating a
significant number of repairs.
- A major email outage in late December/early January that lasted more than 5 days and lost
emails that were never recovered.
- The server that supported our mailing lists went down, and the hosting company has
decided not to reinstall the mailing list software.
- Constant problems with being placed on blacklists for distributing spam.
- A decreasing level of support and service, with a generally poor attitude when responding
to problems.
Needless to say, this has caused us many problems, the most noticeable being our loss of
mailing lists, but also certain members of the committee and board not receiving emails from
ccscne.org because their campus is blocking our domain.
I investigated moving our domain to CCSC's hosting service and making our site a sub- site of
CCSC. Myles McNally contacted their hosting company with my questions about services that we
are currently using. The response he received indicated that we would have to purchase a full
hosting account from their company if we want to continue to do what we currently do. Their
price seems to be $20/month, which is a significant increase from our current $5/month.
I have been hosting my own private domain with the same company, and so I have been dealing
with the same problems. My contract with them expired in March, so I did some shopping and
chose a new service for myself. I chose the hosting company Dreamhost. They were recommended
to me by a webmaster that I know from another non-profit. I have been hosted with them for 2
months now, and have had no major problems. Their services are much better than our current
host, although their prices are a bit higher. What I have been most impressed with so far, is
how well they keep their customers informed about service issues and their resolution. Our
current service never gave advance notice of maintenance, did a very poor job of reporting
outages, and generally was uncommunicative.
If we are listed with the IRS as a non-profit, we will get free hosting from Dreamhost. If not,
we will pay either $9.95/month for a year paid in advance, or $7.95/month for two years paid in
advance. We will get a $97 reduction for the first year. Both of these prices include the
registration of our domain name, which currently costs us $20/year.
&bull Larry will ask National about it.Motion (SM/DH): That Karl will move the host to Dreamhost and that he is authorized to arrange for payment.
&bull It is possible to register our domain name (CCSCNE) separately.
&bull If we move to Dreamhost, it can be paid for via Bill Myers; Amruth will follow up on this idea.
Passed: unanimously
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Report unavailable
The matter was discussed at some length, but no dates were decided on. It was agreed that Adrian would find the dates.We have previously discussed the desirability of deciding all submission dates for the next conference at the April meeting.
The question was asked as to why there are "no shows" to our conference. It was conjectured that the "no shows" are merely seeking a publication and do not care about coming to the actual conference. There was much discussion, including the following:We had two papers withdrawn from this meeting. Other conferences have had an even more sever problem with no shows. One conference had four presenters not show up and did not give any notice that they were going to miss the meeting. Is there anything that can be done to discourage this practice (under than writing a letter that says "Bad author, don't do that again")?
Motion (VP/IR): That CCSCNE keep track of "no shows" via a black list in order to see if it becomes a problem, and to follow up with offending authors.
Passed: 7/3/2
In the discussion of the motion (1) Scott McElfresh observed that we have not been very good in
the past in maintaining such black lists, and (2) it was agreed that the Board Secretary would
maintain such a list.
It was agreed that future CFPs would contain a remark such as:
Because the Conference Committee and Board deem the actual presentation of an accepted paper as vital to to success of the conference, authors of accepted papers who choose not to attend are not likely to have papers accepted at future conferences.
No comments were made.Obviously we had many problems with the board email list. We need to make alternative arrangements.
Scott McElfresh remarked that one of our panels this year was not really a panel at all but a tutorial.10. Panels, Tutorials, Workshops, and Posters abstracts There was clearly some confusion regarding the length of these abstracts and how they were submitted. I think we need to discuss this to be totally clear in the information we tell presenters.
&bull It was suggested that we could use a few more Board members: one suggestion was Paul Tymann, who indicated that he might agree to it. Further, Larry agreed to ask Tim Huang if he wants to continue on the Board.
&bull As regards the Birds of a Feather sessions, which we had this year, it was suggested that we need a sign-up sheet, possibly at the registration desk, and that proposing the subjects for discussion in advance of the sessions was successful.
&bull Frank remarked that we should try to keep the registration form to no longer than one page. Karl agreed to try to fix this.
&bull Scott noted that after the programming contest there is nothing for the students to do and that we might ask the students for suggestions to remedy this. Scott also suggested that the membership meeting be kept to no more than 10 minutes (if possible) and that it be part of the lunch proceedings. Larry suggested that for the membership meeting, we should not use a microphone. These matters were all agreed to.
&bull It was remarked that having the best paper candidates selected by the papers chairs seems to be "hit and miss". It was suggested that we might have a separate committee to select the best paper candidates and thereby improve the screening process, which this year resulted in some of the candidate papers being below the usual standards we expect. A further suggestion was that we might even consider doing away with the best paper awards altogether. It was agreed that these matters would be discussed at the September meeting.
&bull Amruth suggested that we should have at the conference a message board on which attendees can place non-commercial messages. It was agreed that this matter would be discussed at the September meeting.
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Respectfully submitted,
Richard Wyatt
(CCSCNE Secretary)