Attending: Larry D'Allesandro, Frank Ford, David Hemmendinger (2004 conference chair), Tim Huang, Amruth Kumar, Bill Taffe, Charles Welty, Karl Wurst, Richard Wyatt

Apologies received from: Danny Kopec, Scott McElfresh, Ingrid Russell

Missing:  Dick Close, Ralph Morelli, Viera Proulx

I. Minutes of January Meeting

1. Motion to accept.

Minutes of the April 2003 meeting were accepted unanimously.
(The minutes of the previous meeting will no longer be handed out at the meeting. They are available, of course, from our web site.)

II. Reports

2. Chair's Report: Richard (Chair's Report)

The 2003 conference made $10,000 profit.  Depending on national's decision on being able to bank these funds Scott has allocate $3000 to the 2004 conference and $8000 to the 2005 conference.

Richard is going to contact Scott to see why we are making so much profit.  Perhaps we did not need to raise the registration fee for this year.  Now that it is raised it is difficult to reduce it.

Since Wentworth Institute will not be hosting the 20 conference we need a host.  Vassar came up briefly as a possibility.  Richard will contact a person at Drexel who has shown some interest. Other suggestions were Northeastern, Holy Cross, Williams College (Duane Bailey).  People at these schools will be contacted individually.

3. Editor's Report: Larry (Editor's Report)

4. Webmaster's Report: Karl (Webmaster's Report)

We need to have the papers and poster winners posted on the web.  Also the programming contest winners should be linked from a Who's Who page.

5. Treasurer's Report: Scott (Treasurer's Report)

6. Membership Chair's Report: Danny

7. Registrar's Report: Frank

Registration did not work out well at the last conference.  We need to send all registration money to one person.

Also, need one simple form on which people check the appropriate box to say what their classification is (attended, presenter, contest team, etc.) and send to one person.  One problem with this is that the names for members of the programming contest (and sometimes the student posters) were not known a registration time.

8. Operating Document Sub-Cmte Report: Frank, Karl, Amruth

Delayed to January

III. Old Business - Updates, Revisits

9. Reminder of the January Meeting

As scheduled at the April meeting, the January conference committee meeting is on Jan. 17, 2004.  The board meeting may become a two day meeting starting in the afternoon of Jan. 16 and continuing the morning of Jan. 17.  (Richard will follow up on this by email.)

10. Spending Extra Moneys

David brought up the possibility that a contribution of as much
as $5000 could be available for the 2004 conference. There was
much discussion of this. Members did not want to set high prize
money precedence on this conference that could not be met in
future conferences. Suggestions included:
 

More money for speakers.
More travel subsidies.
Opulent goody bag.
Better meals, breaks, and social hour. Have beer and wine?
 

Other suggestions are welcome.

Discussion.  Discussed in the conference committee meeting on this date.

11. Guidelines for Paper Reviewers

A paper reviewer this year has asked us to look at providing guidelines to
standardize reviewers' expectations and the judging criteria. We have
attempted to look at this matter in the past but did not make much
headway. As I recall, the central difficulty was that the board was not
itself of a unanimous view as to what constituted ``a good paper''. Do we
want to take up this difficult but important matter anew?

Delayed to September.

Discussion.  Delayed to January

There have, it has been reported to me, again been some regrettable delays
in the release of forms relating to the conference. Every effort needs to
be made to avoid delays in the future. It has also been reported to me
that other matters have not been dealt with in a timely manner. Again,
every effort needs to be made to avoid untimeliness.

Delayed to September.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

From the April minutes:

Members of this year's conference committee have asked that the
board consider requiring students to bring their own
posterboards in the future.

Discussion. There was no decision made but several members
thought that displayers should bring their own display board.
Dimensions would be stated in the CFP and other advertising.
Some could be available at the conference, too, for people who
have difficulty transporting them.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

14. Conference Receipts

From the April minutes:

A member has asked for clarification:
Who sends receipts? In the past, when registration was at the
national level, email receipts were sent by the person receiving
the registration, not the treasurer. That model might make
sense here, except that several different people get
registrations. It would be important to have a consistent
receipt form. For paper receipts, a special request could be
made.
When are receipts sent? In the recent past, receipts were
sent when the data was entered into the database, which was
typically soon after checks were deposited.

Discussion and clarification. Delayed.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

15. Use of Our NE E-Mailing List

From the April minutes:

This year we have had a request from someone wanting to use our
email list to send a CFPs. The conference was an entirely
reasonable one. However, as we did not want to have to make
decisions as to whose requests to honor, we disallowed the use
but allowed the person to use the list for the conference they
had attended.
We should have a policy on this matter?

Discussion. Delayed to September.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

16. Presentations Without Publication

From the April minutes:

A member has asked:
Should we allow a presentation if the paper or abstract
is not submitted for publication in the proceedings?
What about a tutorial, especially an invited one?

Discussion. Delayed to September.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

From the April minutes:

Who gets them: programming contestants, students poster
presenters, others?

Discussion. Delayed to September.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

From the April minutes:

This year we have had at least $2500 over our budget. There
has been a lively debate as to how to spend it.
Discussion. This was discussed in item 9, above. The relevant
portion is:
Suggestions included:
More money for speakers.
More travel subsidies.
Opulent goody bag.
Better meals, breaks, and social hour. Have beer and wine?

Other suggestions are welcome.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

From the April minutes:

This year, we have had a presenter -- NSF --- not show up to do the presentation.
What do we want to do about such occurrences?
Discussion. Delayed to September.

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

20. Keeping the Treasurer in the Picture

Scott reports:

Richard,

I would like to have on the agenda for the next meeting:

"coordination of seeking outside fundings". With the whole speakers
money and SIGCSE thing this year, the treasurer was only involved as an
initial "what do you think of this idea?" contact, and then copied on a
few of the pieces of correspondence.

As treasurer, I have a responsibility to make sure that we are not
getting funds over the appropriate amounts. For instance, if we give
$150 to someone for travel expenses, and we get $500 in external funds
for travel expenses, but the total expenses were only $550, then there
is a double dip. The individual could get in trouble for getting too
much reimbursement (unless they count it as income), but CCSC could also
get in trouble for not accounting properly. Someone needs to verify this.

Further, as this year shows, all money problems come to me, but I don't
always have complete information.

At this time, I do not have a solid proposal to make, but I do think
that there should be serious discussion of ways to better this process.

-Scott

Discussion.  Delayed to January.

21. On Paper Submissions

Richard,

In light of recent CCSC emails, I think the NE CFP should say that the work submitted should be "unpublished submissions ".

Ingrid

Discussion.  The wording came out to be something like  "we accept papers that are neither published nor submitted (elsewhere) and pending a decision"

22. Journal Matters

Larry and Danny have pointed out the following matters in connection with the recent edition of our Journal:
 
1. There was no distinction in the table of contents between papers and student posters. John Meinke agreed that should be changed. He also suggested that Tutorials, Panels, plus the Posters be designated as such in the contents.
2. Someone has mentioned that the authors are sometimes listed with the title of Dr., sometimes not. So their is a question of consistency. John agreed, but said rightly, that authors are often very touchy about this. So he asked for approval of the Board to drop titles from author's names (assuming that's what we want).
3. One paper did not print out correctly (with a lot of boxes in math formulae). No simple solution to this. John doesn't work with TeX. I asked about accepting pdf. He said that he prefers having a pdf, but in addition, not instead of a Word file. John did say that he tries to check the final printed version for errors such as happened with your paper. He says that he missed it this time. (The paper in question was submitted in Word.)

 

 

Discussion.

1.  It seemed that people were leaning towards having the distinction made.  At least one person stated that often larger conferences do not make that distinction.
2.  M/S (Amruth/Frank) Eliminate titles (Dr., Ph.D.) in author listings.  Passed unanimously.
3.  No fix was seen other than being aware of the problem.

23. Space for Demonstrations

Scott writes:

This year, there was a lot of late discussion on space for people to give demos and such. In particular, the people who wrote educational software "Alice" wished to be able to give some sort of presentation and demo. This lead to a long email discussion about whether they should get a vendor table, or whether we should provide specific space for non-profits (such as the Alice people) to demo for free. But then that lead to issues of signups and monopolization of the space, etc.

I think it would be good to discuss this in September with regards to the space at Union.

Discussion.  This was discussed and it was suggested that the vendor fee for a presentation be $200 (in addition to the fee for a table).  The fee would be $0 for non-profits.  It was difficult to see if this was actually passed but it was well received.  Since space for such presentations is difficult and we have the guideline that such presentations not conflict with academic presentations it was decided that a maximum of 3 such presentations be allowed at any conference (less if there are room problems) and the first 3 organizations to ask for a presentation be given one, independent of their being for or not for profit.

24. New Board Members

We now have a board of fourteen members, down from sixteen.

Although anyone may, of course, initiate the procedure for becoming a board
member, we might, from time to time, choose to encourage one or more
persons to do so. Are there any such persons are present?

Discussion:  No such persons present.

25. Adjourned at 4:45 pm by acclamation.