Summary

The website has been running smoothly and consistently. The main topics covered in this report are the following.

• Development of and transition to alternatives to the old mailing lists
• Sub-websites for Schools of IT
• Analytics

Transition to new mailing lists

Following the proposal made to the BoG during the last meetings, the old mailing lists are being replaced by alternative solutions. The chosen solutions are better integrated with the website infrastructure, making it easier for the Online Committee to manage announcements and to ensure a timely dissemination of information. 

• Announcement mailing lists:  Announcements are now automatically sent when news or events are posted on the website. There are now two lists, one for "News items" (e.g. a call for paper) and one for "Events" (e.g. ISIT from July 1 to July6). Users also have the option of subscribing to feeds instead of emails. The transition to the new mailing lists is already in progress. Since early June, all subscribers to the old mailing lists have been receiving a weekly news digest together with a reminder of the transition timeline and detailed instructions to subscribe to the new mailing lists. Out of the 706 subscribers, 188 have made the transition so far; the Online Committee will keep advertising the new mailing lists during the next few months. The new system also allows us to identify the popular news items, for which users actually go to the website for more information. More details will be provided in the next report to the BoG once we aggregate enough data.
• Mailing lists for committees: The mailing list for the BoG has been completely rethought to benefit not only the BoG but also all other committees. As illustrated in the figure below, it is now possible to email all members of a committee using either a web interface or a client email. By default, only the Chair of the committee can use this functionality, but this can be easily extended to other members of the committee. This solution effectively provides a mailing list for all committees, which is automatically updated when the website is updated.

Sub-websites for Schools of IT

The two Schools of IT have been using the infrastructure of itsoc.org for their websites. The School websites have been managed by Deniz Gunduz (EU School) and Bobak Nazer (NA School) with some support from the Online Committee. The two websites can be found at

• http://www.itsoc.org/north-american-school
• http://www.itsoc.org/european-school

Analytics

The last five months of web traffic remain stable with over 300 visits/day  and some peaks above 600 visits in a given day. The traffic comes for 66% from search engines, 20% from direct traffic, and 12% from referring sites. The increase in number of visits is traffic specific to for the Schools of IT.

All of the above statistics may be self explanatory except for  bounce rate , which is the percentage of single-page visits.