Draft
Bob Eberlein, July 2005
Program Committee
For each conference there will be a program committee made up of a Program Chair and a number of Thread Chairs as detailed below.
Program Chair
The Program Chair will be approved by the Policy Council at the time a conference selection is made, or as soon thereafter as possible. Normally the Program Chair will be proposed as part of the overall conference proposal, though a different selection process may be used. In any case the approval of the Program Chair will be done by a separate vote of the Policy Council endorsing the qualifications and responsibility of the Chair. If appropriate, two or more individuals may be appointed to this role to act as Co-Chair and these individuals will collectively take on the responsibilities o the Program Chair as outlined in this and other sections.
It is the responsibility of the Program Chair to appoint Thread Chairs, assign tasks to them and collate their responses. The Program Chair is to act as the interface between the Central Office and program related issues.
Thread Chairs
Thread Chairs are responsible for specific topic areas or Threads. They are appointed by the Program Chair as soon as possible after the appointment of the Program Chair. The appointments must be submitted to the Policy Council for discussion, though no formal vote on the appointments is required.
The number of Thread Chairs is not fixed, but should be large enough that each Thread Chair has a manageable amount of work reviewing and evaluating papers submitted to a particular thread. The Program Chair is encouraged to maintain continuity by reappointing a significant number of Thread Chairs from prior programs.
The Thread Chairs will carefully evaluate the papers submitted to their Thread based on the submissions and the reviews provided by the peer review process. Based on this evaluation the Thread Chairs will recommend that paper be accepted or rejected and recommend a presentation format for accepted papers. Thread Chairs are also responsible for organizing accepted papers into coherent sessions.
The ultimate responsibility for the program lies with the Program Chair, and the Program Chair has final decision authority for all paper dispositions.
Session Types and Mandatory Sessions
The program will consist of Plenary Sessions, Parallel Sessions, Poster Sessions and alternative format sessions deemed appropriate by the Program Committee. Presentation length including discussion will not be less than 15 minutes for plenary/parallel presentations and not more than 30 minutes for parallel presentations. The number of concurrent parallel sessions will not exceed 7. Posters will be scheduled so that they may be up for at least ½ of a day and will have a designated time during which the authors will be available for discussion. Mandatory Sessions include as plenary sessions: Jay W. Forrester Award, Business Meeting, Closing Ceremony/Special Awards and the Presidential Address. Mandatory parallel sessions include the Policy Council Meeting (normally before the conference opening), Committee Meetings and Chapter/SIG meetings.
Paper Submission
Paper submission will be done electronically through a web submission system maintained by the Central Office. It is the responsibility of the authors to insure that a submission is made in the correct format with no reference to their names to support a blind review. Papers will be submitted to one of the designated conference Threads.
There will be a single submission deadline set by the Central Office in consultation with the Program Chair.
Paper Review
The paper review process will be a blind review process supported by the web submission systems. All Society members and all authors submitting papers will be given the opportunity to review papers. Nonmembers suggested by the Program Committee will also be given the opportunity to review papers. Any reviewer who has previously submitted and inappropriate review will, at the discretion of the Program Committee, not be asked to review papers again. Reviews will be assigned on a rolling basis with a relatively short deadline for completion.
Paper Selection and Tentative Session Definitions
Thread Chairs are responsible for making recommendations on all papers submitted to their Thread. Access to the submitted papers and reviews of those papers will be provided to the Thread Chairs on a double blind basis so that they do not know the names or authors or reviewers. Using this information the Thread Chair will recommend whether to accept or reject a paper as well as specify the tentative presentation format. During this review process the Thread Chairs are also responsible for grouping papers into logical sessions. This initial grouping is tentative and should be based primarily on content. Though a target number of papers per session will be provided by the Program Chair it is acceptable to have 1 or 2 too few or too many papers in this initial grouping. Papers should be ordered by relevance to the session title.
The deadline for paper selection will be set by the Central Office in consultation with the Program Chair.
Acceptance Notification
After a paper has been selected for acceptance or rejection, the communicating author will be notified by email. This notification will be made by the central office or automatically through the web submission system. For accepted papers this notification will include the proposed presentation format.
Program Definition
Once the paper selection has been made the Program Chair will consult with the Central office to determine a workable program layout given the available conference facilities. While acceptance and rejection of papers are expected to be made based solely on the merits of the submission, the actual presentation formats and time allotments need to be made with room capacities taken into consideration. The Program Chair will use the tentative session definitions of the Thread Chairs and may ask Thread Chairs to make revisions or make revisions directly.
Session Assignment
The Program Chair, in consultation with the Thread Chairs, shall define the non-mandatory plenary sessions. The Thread Chairs are responsible for the assignment of the remaining papers based on the numbers provided by the Program Chair. Where possible, for each Parallel Session one paper that might be promoted to that session in case an author were unable to be present will be identified.
Author Notification
Authors will be notified of their session assignment by the Central Office. Those identified as backup papers for parallel sessions will be given the choice of preparing two types of presentations.
Scholarly Program
The scholarly program will be compiled by the program chair. This will include the timing of all Plenary Sessions including mandatory sessions, all parallel sessions formed by the Thread Chairs and all Poster and alternative format sessions. In the case of parallel sessions those that are likely to be less attended will be identified to aid in room assignment. The Scholarly program will be completed as soon as possible after session assignments.
Room Assignment
Room assignment will be preformed by the Central Office based on the Scholarly Program and other meeting requirements.
The Central Office will compile the Abstract Proceedings to
be printed for distribution at the conference. Web proceedings will be made
available as soon as possible after acceptance notifications go out. Authors
will be allowed to update their papers through the conference and for a period
of 30 days thereafter. A CD containing the conference proceedings will be
produced and mailed to conference participants after this time. This is
intended to make the proceedings as current as possible. [Note:
this last item will be revised based on Policy Council Vote on the
dropping of CD’s.]