Board Meeting -- Minutes

University of Hartford, Hartford, CT, April 17, 2010

Alpha-numeric designators, such as "1A" refer to items not on the original printed agenda.

Attendees

Lawrence D'Antonio (Chair) (LD)
Steven Block (SB) (non-voting guest)
Lonnie Fairchild (LF)
Frank Ford (FF)
Michael Gousie (MG)
David Hemmendinger (DH)
Mark Hoffman (MH) (non-voting guest)
Adrian Ionescu (AI)
Stoney Jackson (SJ) (non-voting guest)
Scott McElfresh (SM)
Hemant Pendharkar (HP)
Viera Proulx (VP)
Ingrid Russell (IR)
Jim Teresco (JT)
Paul Tymann (PT)
John Willemain (JW) (non-voting guest)
Karl Wurst (KW)
Richard Wyatt (RW)

I. Previous Meetings

1. Minutes

MOTION (mover/seconder not recorded): To accept the minutes of the September meeting.
Passed (Subject to two revisions, which had already been made). (14/0/0)

II. Reports

2. Chair's Report: Larry D'Antonio

                                     Chair's Report
 
I. Report from National
 
1. The next national board meeting will be held at George Fox University on October 8-9, 2009.
 
2. National is doing well financially. It has a surplus of $134,000. On the other hand, CCSCNE has
run a deficit the past three years. We should talk about ways in which we can close this gap.
 
3. National is considering using a centralized paper submission system and registration system. The
Fall conferences are using Microsoft~s CMT paper submission system.  Perhaps we will see on-line
registration in the near future (but don~t hold your breath).
 
I. Future Conferences
1. 2011 Conference at Western New England College.  Stoney Jackson (WNEC) and Karl Wurst (Worcester
State) will be co-chairs for this meeting. The conference will be held April 15-16, 2010. The
current status of the conference committee may be seen at http://mars.wnec.edu/ccscne/committee.php.
 
2. 2012 Conference
I visited Quinnipiac College and found them to be very interested in hosting. I will make a motion
that we approve Quinnipiac as the site of the 2012 conference. Mark Hoffman will be the conference
chair (with perhaps a co-chair).
 
3. Future Conferences
Given the increase in attendance that we are seeing in Hartford, I want to keep our conferences in
central locations for the near future. Siena College has expressed an interest in being a host. I
will pursue them as a possible host.
 

Remarks from the meeting on, or made at the time of the discussion of, the Chair's Report

RE: item II-1. The 2011 Conference

The following remarks/topics were noted:

The question of having a local versus a regional site was discussed.

Lonnie noted that it is not really an issue; and that Stoney and Paul can work it out themselves.

Ingrid said that the local web site for 2009 was needed as the regional one was lacking.

Larry noted that CMT is to be used (soon?) by National for submissions of papers and for reviewers of the various areas.

Paul told us he would like to see the NE web site moved to RIT.

Following resignations, Larry used is executive power to appoint Paul as webmaster (for the remaining 1 year) and as Membership chair (for the remaining 2 years).

It was agreed that Paul would move the NE website to RIT.

The Dates for 2011 are:

Conference -- April 15-16
Paper submission -- Nov 19
Panel submission -- Dec 3
Demos submission -- Dec 3
T/WShops submission -- Dec 3
Faculty posters --- Jan 14
Student posters --- Feb 25
Camera ready --- Jan 31

The upcoming September Board Meeting will be September 18, 2010

Hotels: will be downtown, which is a 15-20 minute drive. The rooms will be booked later: it was noted that we typically book: 40-50 for the Thursday, 75 for the Friday, and 25 for the Saturday.

A new copyright form is to be done.

Ingrid remarked that on-line registration should be a priority, and that SIGSCE costs are about $3/registrant + the credit card fee for a total of about $10/registrant. It was noted that PayPal charges about a 3% fee -- Larry will look into all this.

On vendors: we are still not doing too well; we still have rather few. There was some discussion of the matter and the consensus was that we should continue to do what we have been doing.

RE: item II-2. The 2012 Conference

MOTION (LD/FF): To accept Quinnipiac College as the conference venue in 2012.
Passed. (14/0/0)

The 2012 budget should, ideally, be submitted by September 2010. However, it was observed that our budgets have rarely if ever conformed to this schedule.

RE: item II-3. Future Conferences

Larry said he is considering three possible venues: St Johns, Univ of New Haven, and St. Rose.

3. Membership Chair's Report: David Hemmendinger

 
I have little to say except goodbye, as I'll resign in the next 
month or two, happily turning over membership duties to Paul Tymann. 
We have 868 names on the list, one more than last fall.  I'll 
update the list when the CCSC database has our 2010 attendees added to it, 
and then turn it over to Paul together with information about the 
Mailman system and how to deal with the persistent errors in the CCSC 
database. 

4. Editor's Report: Mike Gousie

						    Editor's Report
 
Once again working with John Meinke, getting the papers together for the Journal resulted in no major problems. We had
to email one author a couple of times for a camera-ready submission, but this was resolved in good time. John also did
not mention any problems regarding the length of the Journal; I was somewhat surprised that this did not come up due to
the larger set of papers this year and the addition of many more faculty poster abstracts.  As in the past, John was
grateful that I kept him aprised of the current status and the various upcoming due dates for the Northeast
conference. It seems other conferences spring things on him, which makes it difficult for him to plan his time. We have
a good working relationship.
 
This year, I had hoped that most authors would submit copyright forms electronically.  Electronic copies are much easier
to store and transfer. Unfortunately, most authors still sent me paper copies. The instructions on the web page should
be made clearer next year, indicating that electronic copyright forms are preferred. Furthermore, the ACM has a new
all-purpose copyright form, suitable for both papers and self-hold items (panels, tutorials, etc.). The form may be
viewed at:
       http://www.acm.org/publications/copyright form?searchterm=copyright+form
 
Respectfully submitted,
Michael Gousie

5. Registrar's Report: Frank Ford

5A. Treasurer's Report: Adrian Ionescu

Submission formatting requirements We have to update the Web about the formatting of our
submissions. In particular the length of submissions needs to clearly stated on our web site. At the
Fall board meeting we agreed to the following limits:
       Faculty poster abstracts -- 1 page 
       Demos -- 1 page 
       Panels -- 2 pages 
Also, papers have had a 6 page limit for a few years. We need to make these limits clear to authors
and enforce the limits. We need to discuss the best mechanism for doing so.

We had a significant increase in faculty posters in Hartford. Given those numbers I don’t think that
faculty posters should run at the same time as student posters. We need to discuss how to best fit
faculty posters in the schedule.

Why is attendance up so much? What lessons can we learn from this conference? 

 
We all know that our web site needs fixing in various ways (besides the issue of submission
formatting discussed above). David sent an email with the following comments and suggestions:
 
Web pages:
They're missing various things: 
For the annual conference: 
   -- explicit statement of limits for each kind of submission
   -- ask that all submissions be in the form needed for final submission. We got excessively long
      papers this year; reviewers should review what would be published.
   -- a list not only of committee members but of the area@ccscne.org aliases (missing this year)
   -- explicit contest rules (which could just link to the ACM rules, with a brief statement of how
      ours differ).
   -- Should there be a conference web site separate from the CCSCNE web site? It creates more chances
      for inconsistency and error.
For us: 
   -- UPDATED committee-duty pages 
   -- promptly loaded minutes. 
Submission system: 
   -- updated list of key terms for papers and reviewer areas e.g "pedagogy" is not useful -- it fits
      all our papers.
If we don't go with a 3rd-party one, ours needs some work: 
   -- fix the submission program, which has a serious bug: it lets one of two simultaneous submissions
      clobber the other. This happened twice; once the two papers were there because one was PDF and the
      other, Word, but in the other case, we lost a Word file and had to ask the author to resubmit. Other
      race conditions might not even leave any trace of there having been an error.
   -- fix the review forms, which now discard any text after a double-quote char. It's natural for
      reviewers to use them, and embarrassing to have to tell authors, "here are your reviews, but some
      have been truncated" (and we also don't get to see the entire review.
   -- fix the review-submission mechanism, which let reviewers submit reviews for the wrong paper.
   -- provide all of the scripts that committees might need, such as those to send mail to reviewers
      or authors, extract reviews to send, etc. These should be set up so that the committees can run them
      directly, rather than depending on the webmaster to do it.
   -- provide other scripts, such as ones to help the reviewing-assignment process.

We are due to have elections for Secretary and Editor. The current office holders are Richard Wyatt
(Secretary) and Mike Gousie (Editor). Both have agreed to stand for election again (with minimal
arm-twisting). Further nominations may be accepted from the floor. Tim Fossum is stepping down as
Webmaster and David Hemmendinger is stepping down as Membership Chair. I want to formally thank them
both for their years of service to CCSCNE. Paul Tymann has actually volunteered to take on both
positions. I have the utmost regard for Paul, but it would be nice if someone else would volunteer
for one of these positions (so as to divide up the work more equitably).