Alpha-numeric designators, such as "1A" refer to items not on the original printed agenda.
Lawrence D'Antonio (LD) (Chair)
Aaron Cass (AC) (non-voting guest)
Lonnie Fairchild (LF)
Frank Ford (FF)
Michael Gousie (MG)
Nadine Hanebutle (NH) (non-voting guest)
David Hemmendinger (DH)
Mathew Hertz (MH) (non-voting guest)
Johathan Hill (JH) (non-voting guest)
Mark Hoffman (MH) (non-voting guest)
Adrian Ionescu (AI)
Stoney Jackson (SJ) (non-voting guest)
Bonnie MacSellar (BS) (non-voting guest)
Scott McElfresh (SM)
Viera Proulx (VP)
Ingrid Russell (IR)
Jim Teresco (JT)
Karl Wurst (KW)
Richard Wyatt (RW)
MOTION (SM/DH): To accept the minutes of the September meeting.
Passed: unanimously.
The next Board Meeting (Sept 2011) will tentatively be held on Sept 17, 2011.
The 2012 Conference will be held on April 27-28, 2012.
The 2013 Conference will tentatively be held on April 12-13, 2013.
I. Report from National 1. The next national board meeting will be held November 11-12, 2011 at Furman University. 2. STOP THE PRESSES! National is finally going to have online registration using PayPal for all conferences starting in Fall 2011. This means that we will use this for our 2012 conference. The registration software that has been adopted is ConfTool (http://www.conftool.net/). All conferences will use ConfTool for their registration. ConfTool also has the capability of handling paper submissions. Conferences can choose to use this for their conferences (or continue with their current paper submission system). I will work with Frank Ford on setting up the registration for CCSCNE 2012. I have already worked with ConfTool and it seems fairly easy to use. We need to decide if we want to explore using ConfTool for paper submission. I have not played with it for that purpose and don’t know how flexible it is. I think we should create a small group to look into this and report back at the Fall board meeting. II. Future Conferences 1. 2012 Conference CCSCNE 2012 will be held April 27-28, 2012 at Quinnipiac University. Mark Hoffman and Jonathan Blake will be conference co-chairs. The conference web site can be found at http://www.ccscne.org/2012/. 2. 2013 Conference CCSCNE 2013 will be held at Siena College. The dates for the conference have tentatively been set for April 12-13, 2013. Darren Lim will be a conference chair. 3. Future Conferences I am still looking for hosts for 2014 and later. Please let me know if your school I interested or you know of another school that may be interested.
RE: item I-2: PayPal
PayPal will be available, but will not be required. Moreover, a registrant can used it as a guest; that is, without creating an account. It was also noted that our conference is still making money.
The conference fee will be left at the current amount, $125, for 2012.
Larry reminded us that there exists a subcommittee charged with looking at paper submissions. The members are: David Hemmendinger, Jim Teresco, and Paul Tymann. The subcommittee is to report at the September meeting.
CCSCNE Board Meeting Western New England College April 16, 2011 Editor's Report Working with John Meinke, there were no major problems getting the papers together for the Journal. As in the past, I informed John of the camera-ready deadline date as soon as possible, and kept him up-to-date as to the status of submissions as the deadline loomed. This communication kept things running smoothly. As requested on the Web page, all of the copyright forms were submitted electronically this year (hooray!). However,I received different versions of the form, where all flavors of submissions should now use the same form. Some authors seemed to use the link from last year's conference. This problem should alleviate itself as we continue to post only the link to the current form. As a side-note, there need be only one link for the form on the Web page; there are currently three links to the same item in the same short section 2. Copyright Form on the Presenters Page. The ACM continues to tweak the copyright form. The current version (revised4/1/2011) is available at: http://www.acm.org/publications/copyright form/. Respectfully submitted, Michael Gousie
Larry asked Stoney to submit details of what the various chairs of the 2011 conference did so that the information can be incorporated into the overall statements of responsibilities. Jim reminded us that we need to have session chairs. Some were this year arranged at the last minute, but some did not have one.The duties of the conference committee chairs found in http://www.ccscne.org/for/committee/index.shtml, really need to be updated. Current conference chairs need to do this as their last task for the conference.
The question was raised of who controls the web site content. Suggestions included: the conference chair, the Board President, the webmaster. There appeared to be a consensus that content should be controlled by the conference chair, with the Board President having the authority to do so in an emergency. It was noted that we could use CMS to address this matter. Mark agreed to contact Paul to discuss the matter. It was also noted that we need to archive our conference web sites on our main CCSCNE site. Ingrid and Paul are to look into this matter for the 2010 conference.Paul has said that he will work on updating our web site and report back in the Fall.
It was agreed that Undergraduate and Faculty Posters would continue to be kept separate.Lonnie Fairchild had a number of comments about faculty and undergraduate posters. I am dividing her comments into different points. Faculty Posters and Undergraduate Posters should be two separate committees. Their work is different and takes place at two different times. I think Faculty Posters has an equivalent amount of work to Panels, Tutorial/Workshops/ and Demos and that it would work better to have two people on each of the posters committees instead of coordinating four people. (We did this in 2009, the first year for Faculty posters. There were only 4 submissions the first year and Ingrid combined the committees in 2010. Since then, we have had enough submissions to justify two committees.)
David remarked that the Conference Committee has gotten too big, and that Panels really needs only one
person, as does Speakers. Larry remarked that were we to reduce the Committee size we would seem to be providing a solution in the absence of a problem. It was agreed that the Conference chairs would determine the overall committee size.
There was discussion of and general agreement with Larry's remarks (above).The reviewer assignment system could use some coordination. Since faculty posters are reviewed last, the other committees grab reviewers as they wish, and faculty posters gets the left-overs and may have to go begging the board and conference committee for more (as we did this year). As a note, five years ago Papers (still the highest priority) were the only reviewed submissions. Now it is a lot more. I suggest that guidelines be developed on: -- What is a reasonable assignment for each kind of reviewer? For example, we could consider a 6-page paper review as equivalent to two reviews of panels, workshops, demos, and faculty posters. I think some of the non-paper categories have been using three submissions as a default assignment -- this seems too light to me unless we make an effort to get more reviewers. -- How many reviews are needed for each kind of submission? This year we only got two for each faculty poster (not enough reviewers) and used ourselves in the borderline cases. One author was unhappy with this. -- After papers are assigned, each reviewer for the other categories should be given complete assignments in so far as this is possible, or told that more will be coming. Someone who has reviewed three panels may think their work is done -- and will be surprised two weeks later when faculty posters send the three more things to review. -- Some designated person should keep track of reviewer allocation and use as reviewers are assigned and send out appeals for more reviewers if necessary. This seems preferable to different committees doing this.
It was noted that the coordination of the various reviewing tasks could be improved.
We were reminded that thanks-you letters should be sent to the Committee members.
It was agreed that the details of all these matters would left to the Conference Chair and the Conference Committee.
It was agreed that we need a link on our registration form web page to explain the details of poster judging, thereby encouraging persons to be poster judges.We need to make judging more attractive. Two possibilities that could be considered are: -- have the exhibit during the reception (with faculty posters in the afternoon). This would give people more time for judging. -- Give people more information about judging when they register and try to make it more attractive. (This year we had to beg a lot to find enough judges. In the end we had plenty, and decided to accept all who were willing in the hope that we would get a bigger pool next year.)
It was noted that more time is needed for the actual judging of posters.
There was broad agreement that 2011 was yet another very successful conference.What went well or did not go well with the meeting and how can we be better in the future?
It was suggested that in the future the members of panels might be from a more diverse range of institutions: having all panelists from the same institution was particularly undesirable. It was further noted that, roughly, one third of the panel time should be reserved for discussion. A different but related comment was that the panel members themselves should determine such matters. There was no consensus as to which view should prevail, but it was noted that panels are very hard to coordinate.
It was further suggested that in all panels one of the panelists should be declared as the panel moderator. There was general agreement on this matter, and also on the need to modify the panel description to reflect this.
There was discussion on the fact there is considerable confusion on the differences between tutorials and workshops. The consensus was that there is, alas, no clear way of addressing this matter.
After a little discussion, it was agreed that we do in fact have a policy on refunds -- albeit, an informal one. As there are only one or two cases a year, it was agreed that we would retain the current informal policy of giving refunds only for good reason. However, it was agreed that (1) there are no refunds for students, and (2) there will be no refunds if requested "too close" to the start of the conference.An issue that comes up on occasion is people asking for refunds for their registration. We don't have a policy on giving refunds and tend to do it on a case by case basis. Should we bother to have a policy and if so, what? It seems to me that it is simple enough to have a deadline for giving refunds (many conferences do this).