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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 . 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 . 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