Lawrence D'Antonio (LD) (Chair)
Stephen Bloch (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)
Darren Lim (DA) (non-voting guest)
Bonnie MacKellar (BS)
Ingrid Russell (IR)
Jim Teresco (JT)
Paul Tymann (PT)
Karl Wurst (KW)
Richard Wyatt (RW)
MOTION (FF/SJ): To accept the minutes of the September meeting.
Passed: unanimously.
I. Report from National 1. The next national board meeting will be held October 12-13, 2012 at Metropolitan State College in Denver. 2. There have been some changes in the CCSC Board. Laura Baker will be the new CCSC President, Scott Sigman will be Vice-President (and succeed Laura in 2014). The current President, Bob Neufeld, will become the new Membership Chair. Mark Goadrich is the National Partners Chair. 3. There's not that much else new at National. CCSC is doing very well financially, with total accounts on hand of approximately $160,000. 4. There was discussion on whether regions should have a no show policy. Smaller regions are having a significant no show problem. No uniform policy was greed upon. 5. National has instituted a Distinguished Service Award. Up to three persons may receive this award for outstanding service to CCSC (at the national or regional level). The deadline for nominating someone for the 2013 award is May 1, 2012. Further details may be found at http://ccsc.org/home/nominations.htm. II. Future Conferences 1. 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. 2. Future Conferences I have asked Providence to host in 2014 and Holy Cross to host in 2015. So far no one has said no. Silence signifies assent.
RE: item I-3: National's Account Balance
There was general discussion on the desirability of National accumulating what is rather a large amount of money for a non-profit organization. It was noted that the total balance keeps growing, and has done for many years. There was no general agreement about what, if anything, we should do about the matter.
RE: item I-4: No-Shows
The matter of whether National should have a no-show policy was raised and discussed. Larry noted that there is no agreement at National on this.
RE: item II-1: 2013 Conference
Darren reported the following:Rooms - the needed rooms are reserved (more or less). Parking - may be an issue; we might need to have a shuttle between the hotel and the College. Catering - three options are being discussed. Student volunteers - under control. September Board Meeting - Sept 8, 2012, 10.30am--3.30pm.
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. I should have made the Conference Chairs aware earlier that we would need a preliminary conference program to cross-reference papers and sessions. As it turned out, everything was completed in a timely manner. Again this year, almost all of the authors sent in their copyright forms via email. There also was less confusion as to which form to use. This is improved from last year, when there was a problem with links pointing to different versions of the form. The ACM continues to modify the copyright form. The newest version as of 1/31/12 is now available at: http://www.acm.org/publications/copyright_form. Note the link has also changed from last year. One might wish that the organization be consistent in this matter. Respectfully submitted, Michael Gousie
It was agreed that the responsibilities do indeed need to be updated. Larry will email the 2012 Conference Committee and ask them to update their areas.This comes up yet again. The national Conference Coordinator, Will Mitchell, made a survey of the various regions and concluded that very few regions give a clear list of conference committee responsibilities (and little information on hosting a conference in general). So any solutions for this problem will be greatly appreciated.
The following remarks were made:A subcommittee of David Hemmendinger, Jim Teresco, and Paul Tymann investigated different possible paper submission systems. You may read the report at http://athena.union.edu/~hemmendd/Ccscne/confsystems.
We should not use ConfTool for paper submissions. Any system will require changes to the procedures we are now using. We are planning for the 2014 conference. Our current paper submission system is "OK" -- not great, but OK -- for one more year. At the next meeting Stoney (SJ) will report on the overall standing of new systems. We will try for an open source system. We will have a test site, etc. Perhaps we should spend some of National's money on a new system.
MOTION (PT/SJ): That we continue to use the current paper submission system and task Stoney Jackson with examining options for other/new systems.
Passed: unanimously
The following remarks were made during discussion:Every year there is a scramble to get enough judges for the student posters. This year was especially difficult. We should discuss any suggestions for alleviating this problem.
As a result of this lively and varied discussion, Larry, at Frank's suggestion, formed a subcommittee consisting of Lonnie (LF), Stoney (SJ), and Jim (JT), to report on student poster judging at the September meeting.Faculty sponsors of student posters may be judges, but not of their own students, or of other students from their own College or University. The submission form needs to be simplified. The grading needs to be simplified. A suggestion: pre-select the "good" posters so that only 8-10 "finalists" need to be actually judged. A suggestion: video the posters. This year we had 18 posters per grader. We should inform students as to the rubric we are using. We should drop the policy that prevents students from being present during judging. We might allow the "finalists" (see above) to be present during judging.
The following remarks were made about ConfTool:What went well or did not go well with the meeting and how can we be better in the future?
ConfTool is good for about 90% of what we need. It lacks time stamps on changes. It's interaction with PayPal is too limited. It is not really flexible enough; for example, students see options intended for faculty. We might, perhaps, consider investing in the paid version. No one knew the cost of the paid version, though the figure of $275 was mentioned for comparable s/w. Should we decide to get the paid version, it might be possible to negotiate the features we want or need. Larry, in his capacity as Board President, gave authority to Mark (MH) to act as the Registrar Chair (in place of Frank (FF)) until further notice.
Viera Proulx and Scott McElfresh have resigned from the board. I want to take this opportunity to generously thank both of them for their many years of service to CCSCNE. Their assistance and advice will be greatly missed.
MOTION (FF/DH): That the Board thanks both Viera Proulx and Scott McElfresh for their many years of generous and outstanding service to CCSCNE. They will be greatly missed.
Passed: unanimously.
[Sec: See item 6.]Mark Hoffman put in considerable effort to install ConfTool for the conference registration. We should review how well ConfTool worked and what changes need to be made for future conferences.
Our Webmaster, Stoney Jackson, has made two significant proposals to revise our website. Here is the first proposal. To quote from Stoney: "I would like to convert ccscne.org to a web-application framework (most likely Yii on top of PHP). At the same time, I would like to update HTML and CSS to current standards: HTML5 and CSS3. For now, the appearance and organization of the site would remain roughly the same as it is now. Moving to a framework has the following advantages: 1. A change to a menu or style can be made more consistently. 2. A framework helps developers employ good design practices so that the site will remain maintainable in the future. 3. Frameworks make it easier to integrate with a database. 4. Prepares the site for a major redesign (like the beautiful one Paul proposed a while back). 5. Prepares the site for a new implementation of the submission/review system. I would like to publish the code via GitHub: http://github.com/ , and license the code under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0 (EPL v1.0). Publishing the code would allow the board and other interested individuals to follow my progress, give feedback, and (if inspired) contribute code. While the static or mostly static pages can easily be converted to the new framework, the existing submission system cannot. Until another system is found or built, the existing system will be maintained. Maintaining the existing system will complicate the update. Conservatively, I can complete the conversion to the new infrastructure by the end of July 2012."
If the proposal to convert the CCSCNE website should carry, Stoney has a further proposal to create a new paper submission system (see item 4 above). To quote from Stoney: "I propose building a new submission system based on the new infrastructure described in motion 1. There is a long list of requirements for the new system available here: https://github.com/StoneyJackson/PuRe/wiki/requirements . By August 2013, I expect to deploy a system that exhibits enough of these requirements to run a conference cycle. Additional requirements would be added in the following year. I would like to publish the code via GitHub: http://github.com/ , and license the code under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0 (EPL v1.0). Publishing the code would allow the board and other interested individuals to follow my progress, give feedback, and (if inspired) contribute code. During development, I would regularly (monthly or bi-monthly) release micro-releases. This would allow the board and committee members to try out features of the system and supply feedback. While developing the new system, I will not have time to maintain and improve the current system. Ideally, the current submission system would be temporarily replaced by one of those evaluated by Paul, David, and Jim. Alternatively, someone could take over the job of maintaining the current submission system. In case development runs long, whatever solution should be prepared for a 2-year run."
It was more or less informally agreed that we will change the Saturday lunch. We are now to reserve a room in the student union so that those wanting the lunch can get it in the union at their own expense. There would then be no need to pay for the lunch in advance (as we have been doing) with the resulting waste of much food. Further, we should hold the Membership and Board Meetings in that room after lunch.
SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT ON CONFERENCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Here's what I have so far on conference management systems: My impression is that free versions of the tools don't offer a good reviewer-registration method; i.e. one that lets reviewers register with their list of preferred areas. Two other issues are a) whether they make it possible for reviewers to read all the reviews of what they've reviewed, and b) whether they can have multiple submission-categories. As to cost -- $500/year could be covered by a $5 increase in faculty registration fees. Bottom line -- it's not clear to me that any of the standard systems fulfill all our wishes. Having to add reviewers by hand after an initial file upload wouldn't be too burdensome if we maintained the list from year to year, with only a modest number of changes. I think that having reviewers able to see all reviews of their material is important as a possible way to improve review quality. The SIGCSE system does what we'd need, and Henry seems willing to maintain it for a few years, but it has some defects. Another alternative depends on Stoney: we (he) could refine what we have; e.g. to provide reviews to reviewers in a more convenient format than was done this year, and perhaps use that to supplement a free system if not to replace it altogether. David CMT (cost?) Jim reports: I got some positive but not overwhelmingly so feedback from Eastern on their use of CMT. The Eastern reviewer web page says: 1. Send an email to the papers chair indicating that you would like to register as a reviewer. An invitation to register on our conference submission and review system will be emailed to you. (PREFERRED) OR 2. Create an account first on our conference submission and review system, then send an email to the papers chair indicating that you would like your account to be set up as a paper reviewer. > -- suggesting that reviewer registration capability isn't all that we'd like. > Does CMT permit having different types of submissions? Conftool (cost of Pro version?): The Pro version has a reviewer category, unlike the free one. Lists of reviewers can be imported, and the admin. can set a user status to be "reviewer" -- it's not clear whether users can register as reviewers since they'd thereby get special status, with access to submissions. The "meta-reviewer" category gives access to all the reviews of material that the person reviewed, but it also appears to let the meta-reviewer see their identities; it's not clear if that feature can be turned off. It does permit multiple submission categories. EasyChair (free, hosted): A report that I got on EasyChair from a friend of Ingrid's is that it's the best system that he's used, and also that it uses only the program-committee reviewing model and doesn't have reviewer registration. It's free, and the author says that he doesn't guarantee to respond to questions, and he didn't reply to a query that I sent. It has online discussion of reviews by the program comm. It also lets authors rebut reviews, though our schedule makes it unlikely that we can use that feature. I don't know if it has multiple submission categories. OpenConf (cost: below): The free version doesn't have multiple categories. I don't know whether it has reviewers other than the program committee. Henry Walker wrote about the Pro version: > Although we are still working through our first conference experience, > the software seems to be providing reasonable support. There has been a > learning curve --- particularly for John Dooley who has been shepherding > the project. The system requires reviewers to be designated by the > program committee, but John was able to extract all reviewers from our > SIGCSE/ITiCSE database and do a block add. If we decide to renew for > ITiCSE 2013, we will have several months to contact OpenConf to roll the > reviewers over from ITiCSE 2012 to ITiCSE 2013. There still would need > to be a decision about how to incorporate new reviewers, but the base > records apparently do not have to be re-entered each year. > We will do a more thorough review of OpenConf in the month or so > following ITiCSE 2012, but present indications suggest that the > experiment has been sufficiently successful to be tried again for ITiCSE > 2013. Use of OpenConf has not been cheap, and for the SIGCSE Board is > underwriting the costs for 2012. It provides multiple categories for both submission and acceptance (e.g. to accept a paper submission as a poster). It doesn't appear to provide a means for reviewers to read all the reviewing results, though I've asked John Dooley about that. The pro version costs $275 per event if installed locally by the user. $100 pays them to install it. If they host it: $550 for up to 100 submissions (another $100 for the 2nd 100). Cyberchair: ? SIGCSE system (free): From Henry: > Regarding the use of the current SIGCSE symposium system for CCSCNE, I > would be willing to support that for a few years. However, you should > talk to Paul Tymann at RIT about that, since he has had extensive > experience with the system and has encountered some difficulties for > that conference that have not been reported by other conferences. From Paul: >Probably the biggest has to do with the mailings that are sent out. >For whatever reason many messages sent from Henry's server are flagged >as spam. It was so bad that I manually sent mail from my systems here >at RIT to ensure that things got through. This is a known issue and I >am not sure if Henry is actively working on it. > >A second issue is that the system is old and it is difficult to change >the HTML to fit things into a new web layout. If you can basically >live with the way things are formatted in Henry's system then this is >not a problem. I've used the system. It offers all that we'd need, including letting reviewers read reviews. Using it requires maintaining multiple DB tables, some of which, e.g. for setting up the program, do more than we need, though they could be ignored. It can maintain a reviewer list from year to year.
SUBMISSION SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS R1 Integrated automatic and manual messaging with support for form letters. R2 Deadline management including auto shutoff. R3 Supports role-based access control with the following roles and operations: R3.1 Conference chair able to: R3.1.1 Manage deadlines R3.1.2 Assign committee members R3.1.3 Update general conference pages R3.2 Category chairs are able to: R3.2.1 Set and adjust deadlines R3.2.2 Update category pages (instructions to would-be authors, etc.) R3.2.3 Assign reviewers R3.2.4 Accept/reject submissions R3.2.5 Communicate with authors and reviewers individually and as a group R3.2.6 Get reports of submissions and reviews R3.2.7 Tailor list of keywords R3.2.8 Customize review form R3.2.9 Customize notification letters R3.3 Editor able to: R3.3.1 Receive camera-ready materials R3.4 Authors able to: R3.4.1 Post updates to submission R3.4.2 Post camera ready materials R3.4.3 Read anonymized reviews R3.4.4 Select keywords for submission R3.5 Reviewers able to: R3.5.1 Post reviews R3.5.2 Communicate with chairs R3.5.3 Specify reviewing preferences R3.5.4 Reviewers able to read all reviews of items that they reviewed at the end of the process. R3.6 Members able to: R3.6.1 Create account R3.6.2 Sign up to be a reviewer R3.6.3 Post submission (making him/her an author) R3.6.4 Receive notices and reminders R4 Logging of domain-level events (e.g., paper submitted, paper accepted, paper submissions closed, etc.)