CCSCNE 2013 Membership and Board Meetings
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Siena College
Attendance
Mark Hoffman
Jim Teresco
Bonnie MacKellar
Frank Ford
Larry DÕAntonio
Darren Lim
Karl Wurst
David Hemmendinger
Lonnie Fairchild
Paul Tymann
Stoney Jackson
Adrian Ionescu
Membership Meeting
The meeting was called to order by Larry DÕAntonio. He explained that the purpose is to enlighten the membership on the state of CCSCNE. The general state is very good. We have done quite well at the last 4 conferences. Attendance is at an alltime high. General information on the organization was presented for newcomers: This is the northeast region of CCSC, one of 10 regions. The northeast region is the largest at twice the size of the next closest one which is the eastern region. All CCSC conferences are focused on computer science education.
Next yearÕs CCSC-Northeast conference will be at Providence College, in Providence RI. The year after that, which will be the 20th anniversary of the CCSC-Northeast regional conference, will be at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA.
Larry then asked for opinions and comments on the conference.
Frank Ford stated that the number of papers accepted is going down and also that we did not have many panels this year. He would like to see more panels. There were also two noshows this year. Larry replied that it is true that the number of accepted papers is going down, but we want to keep the quality of the papers up. He thinks the acceptance rate should be 50% or below. Jim Teresco said the acceptance rate this year was exactly 50% (20 papers accepted out of 40 submitted).
Frank Ford also commented that the keynotes were very good this year. Larry said that Ingrid Russell did the invited speakers this year as she usually does.
David Hemmendinger said that the food was very good. The attendees gave a general thanks to the food service.
Karl Wurst asked why there were no workshop descriptions in the program. This seemed to be a workflow problem. Lonnie Fairchild requested that procedures be written down and organized by calendar date. Frank said he wants to send a notice to each committee member with expectations and dates.
Scott Vanderberg, the Faculty Posters co-chair, said that a week for faculty posters was too tight a turnaround. Even though there were only 8 submissions, time is still needed for communication with reviewers. He recommends at least 2 weeks. Larry said the constraint is that we want the faculty poster abstracts in the proceedings. Some people with non-accepted papers might want to do a poster so there needs to be enough time for them to resubmit. David asked if we could notify authors in first week of January. Jim Teresco said that next year the conference is later so there is more slack, but the year following, the conference will be on April 17th, similar to this year. The general schedule for faculty posters is that the poster submission deadline is 1 week after the paper notifications, and the camera ready deadline is only 2 weeks after poster submission. Lonnie asked how often papers are turned into posters? Jim Teresco said that based on reviews of rejected papers, 12 were asked to resubmit as posters. Lonnie said that even with the 2 week system, we canÕt use the usual reviewer pool and have to find special volunteers. Larry said that faculty posters should be reviewed by board members.
Poster statistics: 8 were submitted, with 7 accepted. Only 1 rejected paper was resubmitted as a poster.
Frank asked if the Birds of a Feather concept has fallen apart. No one was sure who was supposed to organize this.
Frank also commented that the vendor session has fallen apart. Larry said that the vendors do not see it as cost effective because people can browseand choose their textbooks online. The vendors do go to SIGCSE because it is so large that they get the most bang for their buck. One person suggested that perhaps we should get vendors who want to recruit students for jobs, but the conference may be held too late in the year for that.
Darren Lim said that for the first time, the conference was responsible for room reservation fees. Will this be a problem at Providence College? Frank replied that he is hoping not, because CCSC is a nonprofit. Stoney Jackson said that his school, Western New England, is starting to charge room fees as well.
Mark Hoffman presented some official numbers: We had 167 students and 135 nonstudent attendees. Frank said this is a stable number.
Larry DÕAntonio adjourned the membership meeting.
Board Meeting
I. Minutes
Frank Ford moved to approve minutes of the September meeting. These were approved unanimously.
II. Committee Reports
2. Chair Report (Larry DÕAntonio)
Text of Report
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I. Report from National
1. The next national board meeting will be held September 21-22, 2013 at the University
of Findlay in Ohio.
2. One recurring issue that comes up at National is the inconsistent formatting for papers.
For example, there seems to be little consistency in the style of references. The question
whether we (the local regions) should do something about this, and if so, what should we
do?
II. Future Conferences
1. 2014 Conference
CCSCNE 2014 will be held at Providence College. The dates for the conference have
been set for April 25-26, 2014. Frank Ford will be the conference chair. The September
Board meeting will be September 7, 2013 (mark the date).
2. 2015 Conference
Our twentieth anniversary meeting will be held April 17-18, 2015 at Holy Cross College.
Laurie King and Karl Wurst will be the conference co-chairs.
3. Future Conferences
Please let me know about anyone interested in hosting future meetings (I have one
possibility for 2016).
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Discussion of report
One problem is that the camera-ready papers for the proceedings have varying levels of adherence to the standards. We need to be more emphatic on formatting. Should we be more proactive? Should the editor check the accepted papers? The papers editors can do the checks. There was a discussion of standards for final formatting. There are two points of ambiguity in the standards: the page length and default settings for the word processor.
3. WebmasterÕs Report (Stoney Jackson)
Text of Report
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FROM: Stoney Jackson, Webmaster for CCSCNE
TO: CCSCNE Board
DATE: April 13, 2013
Webmaster's Report, CCSCNE
1. CCSCNE Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ccscne
a. Tied into ccscne.org (see below).
b. 3 followers. How about you?
2. CCSCNE website: http://ccscne.org/
a. Houses the webpages of CCSCNE and its conferences.
b. Accounts allow web-based creation and editing of web-content. IT'S EASY!
c. Committee chairs have accounts via their chair email (e.g., papers@ccscne.org)
d. If anyone on the Board would like one, please let me know.
e. FYI: new Posts (not Pages) are tweeted, appear on the front page, and listed in menu.
f. SUGGESTION: Integrate membership announcements with site.
g. TODO
i. Free, automatic, off-site backup is full (https://wordpress.backup-technology.com/) – Find a new one
ii. Move CCSCNE 2013 pages under "conferences"
iii. Create CCSCNE 2014 pages.
iv. Move remaining pages from old.ccscne.org
v. Find a calendar plugin that better fits our needs.
vi. Update style.
3. Past CCSCNE site: http://old.ccscne.org/
a. Move remaining content to ccscne.org
b. Move submission system to separate domain.
i. sub.ccscne.org
ii. submission.ccscne.org
iii. rev.ccscne.org
iv. review.ccscne.org
4. CCSCNE's Wiki: http://wiki.ccscne.org/
a. Compromised
b. Lost changes to committee responsibility pages
c. Original copies still available on old.ccscne.org
d. Recommend using ccscne.org to maintain these pages and removing wiki.ccscne.org
5. Implementation of a new Submission Review System
a. On the diagram below, I'm on the border of C1 and C2
b. Working minimal system by early August.
c. I'm on Sabbatical this Fall. Rolling out this system was part of my Sabbatical proposal.
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Discussion of report
Stoney is working on new submission system, and should be able to get a prototype running by August. This will be discussed at the September 7th board meeting. The new system will have similar functionality to what we have now, but we will be able to control it. It will have a template for reviewers.
Item 4 in the report concerns that fact that the wiki was compromised and we lost edits to the committee responsibility pages- any change made after move to wiki is gone.
David asked who is going to update these pages. Frank said he would like to come up with a list of all committee duties but this wonÕt happen before May. Lonnie asked if she should give him the new student poster process? Frank said he wants to streamline the descriptions of the processes and wants to know how the information flows and the dates. Stoney said we can have a master workflow list. Frank replied that this will only get done if one person writes it down.
EditorÕs Report (Mike Gousie)
Text of Report
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CCSCNE Board Meeting
Siena College
April 13, 2013
EditorÕs Report
Putting the Journal together was more problematic this year than any previous year in which I
was Editor. As usual, I worked with John Meinke, and as he prefers, we were in almost daily email contact during the weeks surrounding the camera-ready due date. This kept both of us up-to-date as to the state of camera-ready submissions, copyright release forms, etc. There were no problems working with John. Similarly, there were no problems working with most of the various Chairs.
There were several issues that arose, however, listed below.
¥ For unknown reasons, there were more issues with camera-ready submissions than ever before. Several papers were not ready on time, some were sent to me directly instead of through the system, and Jim Teresco as well as the other Papers Chairs contacted me rather often about papers that were not in the correct format or had other problems. We have no good explanation for this, although it seems clear that we should not have some instructions on ccscne.org and others on old.ccscne.org. In any case, the instructions about required formats were confusing to many, although they clearly state that Òcamera-ready copy must be submitted as both a Word document and a PDF file.Ó Many presenters seemed to have missed the ÒWordÓ portion of the instructions, perhaps because Word is not required for the initial submission. I recommend that all of the instructions are moved to the new site (ccscne.org) to lessen possible confusion.
¥ As is often the case, some authors submitted a different version of the copyright release form than we requested. Stoney Jackson, the webmaster, was especially quick to make changes, and thus these problems were quickly alleviated. A good suggestion from one author was that we should make the copyright form editable, but I do not have the Adobe software to do that. Completely electronic forms might also have legal implications regarding the authorÕs signature.
¥ The most concerning experience this year was my inability to contact the Conference Chairs. Many emails were sent by me with no response. I finally sent messages directly to the individuals rather than using the confchairs alias because I was concerned that the email was not going through. However, this was simply not the case. I later learned that both were often out-of-town, which in itself is not a problem, but arrangements for staying in contact must be made so that deadlines can be met. For example, the preliminary program is used to put together the Journal, so this is needed by the camera-ready date. John Meinke and I were on the brink of writing the Welcome Statement ourselves because none was forthcoming from the Chairs until the last possible moment. Communication with the Conference Chairs has never been such an issue, so hopefully this was just a one-off problem. In any case, the Conference Chairs of future conferences should understand that they will be busy during January and early February, especially in putting together the conference program and writing the Welcome Statement for the Journal, and that they should be readily available via email.
Respectfully submitted,
Michael Gousie
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Discussion of report
The problems with varying adherence to formatting was discussed when the ChairÕs Report was presented, see above.
Registration report (Mark Hoffman)
The registration process seemed to work fine. The registration desk went well. At the back end, there are still some issues. Mark may be the only person who knows how ConfTool works. He has approached Lisa Michaud to serve as a backup.
Paul Tymann asked for a spreadsheet of the attendees.
III Old Business
5. Update on a new submission system
This was discussed when Stoney gave his report – see above.
IV. New Business
6. Discussion of Siena Meeting
Frank asked that we thank Darren Lim for serving as conference chair. The Board thanked him for his hard work.
Stoney Jackson wanted to know what is on the conference evaluation forms.
7. CCSCNE Board Membership
The Board wants to thank Lonnie Fairchild and Amruth Kumar, who are retiring from the Board, for their years of service.
8. Board Elections
There is a candidate for the board - Mark Hoffman. Frank Ford moved that we appoint Mark Hoffman to the board. Paul Tymann seconded the motion. His appointment to the board was unanimously approved.
9. Board Position Elections
The following board positions are up for election.
Chair and Regional Rep – Larry DÕAntonio is standing up for reelection for this position.
Secretary – Richard Wyatt is standing up for reelection for this position.
Editor – Mike Gousie standing up for reelection for this position.
Larry asked if there are there any further nominations. There were none. Frank moved to close nominations. Larry and Karl seconded. The candidates were elected unanimously with the secretary casting one vote. Paul Tymann moved that we elect all three by acclamation. Stoney Jackson seconded this.
Frank Ford nominated Mark as the registration chair, replacing himself. Paul Tymann seconded the motion. The motion was unanimously approved.
10. K12 Coordinator
There was a discussion about the role of the K12 coordinator. David asked if we have a plan for what audience we want to have. There doesn't seem to be a clear goal. Larry said that we want to get college and high school teachers talking. Paul said that SIGCSE has had a high school liasion for years, usually a teacher in the area. They use this person to look at papers to see if there are any of interest and and to drum up attendance. For CCSCNE, everything is likely to be of interest but we should find a local high school teacher to drum up interest. David suggested we use local CSTA chapters. Karl asked for a definition of local, stating that there is a very active CSTA in the Boston area, particularly people from Worcester which is close to Providence. Frank also runs a high school programming contest with involved teachers. Frank also said that one way to get high school teachers to attend is to give them credit for continuing education. Larry thought we should charge them less. Paul suggested we ask Google to help subsidize the teachers. Larry asked Karl to contact the Worcester teachers to see if they would come to September meeting. Karl added that they are connected with Google Northeast.
11. Multiple Submissions
From the agenda: ÒMike Gousie brought up, which I have also noticed, that some people are submitting several items to the same conference. ItÕs not clear that this is necessarily requires a
policy or is even a problem, but I thought it would be worth discussing.Ó
Frank said he sees nothing wrong with it. One example was Swapna Gokhale had a paper and a tutorial which were on the same topic. Frank said that one person needs to be in charge of the final program and make sure there is no overlap. David said we should have the same deadline for papers, workshops and tutorials. Paul said that deadlines for all submissions with the exception of posters will be the same next year.
12. New ACM Copyright Policy
This is informational only. Larry said that all regions have uniform copyright. Frank said that you can't post your paper on your site. David said you can post a preliminary version.
13. Adjournment
Frank made a motion to adjourn. This was seconded by Paul Tymann.