Online Committee Report, ITW 2009, Taormina

Summary

As the Society website grows in visibility and usage, the Online Committee continues work to make the website a more integrated and useful resource for the IT community through the following activities:

  • Coordination with selected committees and Society volunteers to help them make better use of the available website functionality
  • Development of policies and documentation to make it easier for all community members to contribute to the website
  • Software development and bug fixes to improve or enhance functionality

The bulk of recent activities have been focusing on the organizational and policy aspects, although some software development work has been proceeding using the Online Committee budget.  The Online Committee does not expect to request additional funds for software development this year, but will continue to focus on helping the community "catch up" to the existing website functionality.

This report contains 4 calls for a sense of the BoG.

Sense of the BoG

  • Include Society Newsletter Editor and Secretary as ex-officio members of the Online Committee
  • Reorganization of website top-level tabs and drop-down menus
  • Policies for registrations, commercial announcements, and copyright issues
  • Joint editorial committee for web, newsletter, and eventual "online magazine" or "surveys" publication

Discussions

Committee Organization

The Online Committee began with a number of volunteers who had been involved in the development of the new website, and several ex-officio members have been added.  The Committee currently consists of the following volunteers:

  • J. Nicholas Laneman, Notre Dame (Online Editor & Chair)
  • Andrea Goldsmith, Stanford (Ex-Officio)
  • Frank Kschischang, Toronto (Ex-Officio)
  • Matthieu Bloch, Georgia Tech-Lorraine
  • Jean-Francois Chamberland, Texas A&M
  • Amin Mobasher, Stanford
  • Stefan Moser, National Chiao Tung University
  • Mehul Motani, National University of Singapore
  • Anand Sarwate, UCSD
  • Adriaan J. van Wijngaarden, Bell Labs

Since ISIT 2009 there has been substantial distribution of responsibilities beyond the Online Editor, specifically:

  • Matthieu Bloch: Developed and ran the 2009 School of IT Website; working with Bruce Hajek to coordinate conference announcements and web presence; participating in software development with SixFeetUp
  • Anand Sarwate: Working with Committees and Chapters to mimic BoG meeting folder functionality; also updating Awards and cleaning up Profile registrations; participating in software development with SixFeetUp
  • Amin Mobasher: Working with Newsletter Editor to develop joint news items and announcements

The Online Committee proposes including the Society Newsletter Editor and Secretary as ex-officio members.   As described below, there is already growing collaborations between the Online Committee and Newsletter Editor.  The Committee believes it would be useful to have the Secretary participate in the process of maintaining updated lists for BoG, Committee, Chapter memberships and Awards.

Content Reorganization & Documentation

Based upon significant feedback from Officers, Committee Chairs, and Society volunteers, the Online Committee is reorganizing the website structure in terms of top-level tabs and drop-down menus to make it more natural to browse for relevant information.

A draft reorganization is evolving on the development website . Among several changes:

  1. Information on past and upcoming conferences is now part of the News & Events top-level tab. Any registered user can upload a conference event in http://dev.itsoc.sixfeetup.com/news-events/conferences/upload and submit it for publication. Upon approval by an Online Editor, the conference events are automatically displayed in appropriate folders and archived once the event is passed. This new organization should ensure a timely publication of all conference events.
  2. Conferences can now appear as standalone websites, see for instance ISIT 2007 . The Committee is actively working with SixFeetUp to further develop this functionality.

The Committee welcomes feedback on this new structure.

Policies

The Online Committee has been discussing several policy issues with Officers, Conference Chairs, and Society volunteers.  The Committee would appreciate a sense of the BoG on several fronts.

Registrations

The number of registration requests has increased substantially over the past few months. To simplify the approval process, the Online Committee proposes to adopt a clear set of policies and seeks a sense of the BoG on these policies.  The following classes of individuals should be eligible for profiles on the ITSOC website:

  • any member of the Information Theory Society,
  • any person who has published in one of the IT Society's sponsored conferences or in the Transactions,
  • graduate students whose supervisor/advisor satisfies one of the criteria above.

In order to register a profile with the site, we will require users to submit a photo as well as information regarding the criteria above. The online committee will also decide on individuals not meeting the above criteria on a case-by-case basis.

Commercial Announcements

There has been some discussion about a policy for restricting the types of announcements that can be posted on the Society website. The Online Committee recommends posting for no charge all news, events, and announcements that are reasonably believed to have an actual or potential benefit to members of the IT community.  This includes commercial announcements for special issues edited or books authored by members of the IT community.

For such items that have no actual or potential benefit to members of the IT community, the Society could consider charging a fee for postings.  This could include commercial sponsorship of the website, advertising, affiliations and linking with related websites, and so forth.  A more substantial conversation about such revenue-generating content is required, but it would be useful to obtain a sense of the BoG to see if it is worth investigating these issues.

Copyrights, Terms & Conditions

There has been some discussion of copyright issues associated with postings to the website, especially PDFs of papers and slides, video, and images.  At a minimum, the Society may want to have in place a "Terms & Conditions" page that all uses must read before registering. This Terms & Conditions page could required that contributors ensure that they have proper copyright permissions before posting content to the website. At a minimum, the Society should require the permission to host and display the content and at a maximum should take copyright ownership of the content. The Online Committee recommends appointing some of its members to explore these issues further with IEEE.

Newsletter and "Online Magazine"

The Online Committee and Newsletter Editor have been working to develop a joint submission and review process for news, announcements, and events.  Amin Mobasher and Stefan Moser from the Online Committee have volunteered to work with the Newsletter Editor Tracy Ho to accelerate the announcements process.

Expanding this collaboration, the Online Committee and Newsletter Editor seek a sense of the BoG on forming a joint editorial committee.  Initially, the committee will consist of 3-4 people, with the following goals:

  1. Improve integration of the newsletter and website, in the form of a joint online/print newsletter.
  2. Explore avenues to expand the scope of newsletter content, for instance, soliciting perspective pieces on various aspects of IT in industry and academia.
  3. Explore avenues to expand the scope of online-only content, e.g. longer technical surveys and tutorials.  This may eventually lead to creation of an online magazine or surveys-type publication.

Updates

Usage Statistics

The new website includes functionality for the Online Committee and other Society volunteers to track usage and trends.

Highlights of the  Google Analytics report  for 2/9/2009 - 9/28/2009:

  • 59,142 visits, 156 countries
  • 255 visits / day
  • 3+ min / visit
  • 52% are "new" visits
  • Search engines generate 55% of traffic
  • News / announcements working well, taking off
  • 2009 School of IT page is the second-most visited page, behind main webpage and above the "Information for Authors" page for the IT Transactions 

Conferences

Matthieu Bloch has volunteered to liaison with the Conference Committee and Conference Organizers.  In the the last few months, the Online Committee has engaged discussions with Bruce Hajek to clearly identify the needs of conference organizers in terms of web hosting and steer software development accordingly. In particular, it has been decided

  • to improve the visibility and timely dissemination of conference announcements; this should be partially solved by the reorganization of the top-level tabs of the website;
  • to investigate the possibility of providing simple URLs to hosted websites (such as www.itsoc.org/itw2010, etc.); a partial solution is already available (see for instance here ), but requires further investigation and testing;
  • to host a small-scale conference to demonstrate the benefits of hosting within the Plone architecture; this has already been done to some extent with the 2009 School of IT website , but more precise guidelines needs to be provided to simplify the setup.

Chapters

Anand Sarwate has volunteered to liaison with the Membership and Chapters Committee as well as individual chapters.  Since the website went live:
  1. Chapter chairs have been contacted and the information about chapter contacts has been updated.  In particular, the Russia Chapter information has changed significantly.
  2. Giuseppe Caire met with chapter chairs at ISIT in Seoul and encouraged them to use the website to organize their activities.
  3. Many chapters are joint with other IEEE societies and already have locally hosted websites with their activities -- they have added links when this is the case.  The Israel chapter is actively using the website for their events.
Targets for the next phase of chapter integration:
  1. Coordinate with all chapters to file their annual reports online.  Use the Chapter Committee chair's authority to make this happen.
  2. Set up a system using the site to coordinate the Distinguished Lecturer program.
  3. See if external chapter websites hosted by IEEE can somehow be integrated (perhaps via RSS) into the ITSOC website.

Software Development

Following ISIT, the Online Committee has continued development of additional features for the following aspects of the Society's web presence:

  • Conference websites, with the ability to host the website within the main site but allow for a customized look and feel for the conference site
  • Math / LaTeX support to allow for newsletter, tutorial, and survey articles to be stored in searchable text form within the website like news items and announcements, instead of requiring PDF for such content
  • Better web / email integration, making it much easier to email all members of a Committee or Chapter, email all Committee or Chapter Chairs, etc.

The proposed budget for these features was under the Online Committee's $10K annual budget for 2009, but the BoG approved an additional $15K for development at ISIT.  So far SixFeetUp has billed approximately $8K.  As in the past, development has been effective and under budget.  There is a good chance we will have a demo for these new features by ITW Taormina.