"Useful" Announcements, News, and Events

Some criteria should grant automatic publication:
- event sponsored by IT society
- news related to a prominent person in the IT society (prize, award)

An easy way of judging the usefulness would be to disregard items that do not contain the words "information theory", "coding", or "communication theory" That's usually a good filter for conferences.

All posts to the announcements mailing list and website are moderated, which means that I (in the past and currently) or members of the Online Committee (just beginning) review and approve items before they are distributed or made publicly visible, respectively. At present we do not have any formal policy that restricts the content allowed, so we have mainly be screening out spam and other junk that has *nothing* to do with information theory.

We can institute whatever policy decided upon by the Society, but I recommend that it be clearly defined, simple, and posted -- so that we can point to it if/when anyone complains.

  A clearly defined, simple policy would be: "No commercial announcements." But then there are going to be matters of interpretation. Which of the following are "commercial announcements"?

a. Offering of a new textbook by Robert G. Gallager from Cambridge University Press.
b. Solicitation of articles for a special issue of an Elsevier journal.
c. Announcement of a "fest" for Solomon Golomb, whose festshcrift is to be published by Springer.

  Nonetheless, I recommend that we announce a policy of "no commercial announcements," and then deal with issues as they arise.

  With regard to who is allowed to register on the Web site (and post announcements), I suggest that we adopt the "endorsement" system of arXiv; see <http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement>.