EC Meeting, October 22, 2024

Nine out of 16 EC members (including Lucia, ACM liaison) are in attendance. 

Neha and the Conferences Team lead a discussion on the upcoming Conferences Town Hall scheduled for October 28, 2024. They talk through the agenda and slides for the town hall. Key topics include financial well-being, ACM Open, new conferences, and site selection. Other topics which are also good to know about if there’s time (e.g., bylaws, CARES) will follow. Matt plans to restructure the agenda accordingly.

Matt leads a discussion on adding new conferences. Matt discusses some of the complexities of the timeline of creating a new conference, and when the EC should provide what kind of approval for moving forward with sponsoring a new conference. We note that clear communication is needed to manage expectations, emphasizing support for new conferences but also the need for financial sustainability. We decide that it is important to have a vote to approve a conference before moving forward with submitting a TMRF. 

• We also discuss conferences more broadly, affirming that the Conferences Team should support conferences in avoiding losses and encouraging best practices. One major point of communication is ACM Open; we discuss the need to help conferences understand what ACM Open will entail and what workflows they may need to establish to work with the ACM Open model. 

Neha provides an update on who has applied for open calls. Nominations are still open.

Neha shares an update that multiple SIGs will get together to address the issue of peer review. She notes that representation from all conferences will be needed in the next few months.

Neha notes that pages from the old website seem to still be coming up in search results, and that we should create a plan to finish transferring pages to the new website in order to phase out the archive. Communications and Operations will work together on this. 

Neha shares that one goal this term is to streamline committees, and focus on essential ones. However, if EC members feel there is a need for any additional committees, we should consider it. There will be an open call via Submittable to recruit new volunteers. 

Niklas briefly asks for suggestions for more reviewers for an awards subcommittee. EC members will follow up on Slack. We also discuss that there should be more efforts to diversify nominations for volunteers in the next year.