The Ad Hoc Committee for Online Content and Services was formed at the CISS 2007 BoG meeting. This report summarizes the membership of the Committee and its recent discussions, leading to a wish list and proposal for surplus spending in the current year.

Summary During a meeting at CISS 2007, the BoG approved an Ad Hoc Committee whose mission would be to develop a strategy for more integrative use of the web (both content and services) by the Society. Through largely email discussions, the Committee has formulated a wish-list of online content and features that it felt would be useful to Society members and the Information Theory community as a whole. Web developers were then contacted to obtain cost rough estimates for those features not readily available. The Committee recommends approving $10K to pursue detailed specifications for an initial phase, and holding / budgeting capital investments of $100K (or more) and operating investments of $15K for the next 2-3 years for subsequent phases. Committee Membership After the BoG's approval of the Committee and a Chair, volunteers and suggested names were sought. These individuals were contacted by the Chair, and an email discussion list began. Current members of the Committee include: * J. Nicholas Laneman (Online Editor, Chair) * Rich Baraniuk * Joao Barros * Ralf Koetter * Frank Kschischang * Steve McLaughlin * Alon Orlitsky * Ashutosh Sabharwal * Anant Sahai * Sergio Servetto * Daniela Tuninetti * Adriaan van Wijngaarden Recommendations Based upon its discussions and current assessments of web technology, the Committee makes the following recommendations: 1. The Committee recommends that the BoG make serious cultural and financial investments to revolutionize the means of developing, exchanging, and archiving knowledge in information theory and related fields on the web, especially in terms of comprehensiveness and ease of use. * Society content and operations should be identified for migration to the main Society websites, and timelines and processes for mandating use of the web should be developed. These should include, for example: online repositories for the BoG, committees, and conference organizers; mass digitization of existing information theory resources; integrative and streamlined handling of conference and journal publications through the web; efforts to record and archive lectures in audio-visual form; and last, but perhaps most important, the ability to discuss, using mathematics, and collect any of this online content, thereby capturing the broader knowledge base and activities of the Society. * Capital expenses in excess of $100K and operating expenses of $15K for the next 2-3 years should be held / budgeted for pursuing the above goals. * Opportunities for partnering and sharing costs with other Societies, e.g., the IEEE Signal Processing Society, should be explored. 2. To make the best use of the above investments, the Committee recommends that it be tasked by the BoG to do the following: * Recruit more "typical users" and key representives of the concerns identified above * Initial specification of needed functionality and identification of a main web application platform (1-2 months, with the help of a developer) * Contracting with a developer or developers for a priority subset of the desired functionality (5-6 months) * Testing of implemented functionality, re-assessment of needs and priorities (1-2 months) 3. The group should specify a broad set of needed functions, recommend the main web application platform, and identify 2-3 potential developer partners with cost estimates by the Allerton 2007 BoG meeting. An initial budget of $10K should be immediately approved to fund development of rigorous specifications in partnership with a professional web development company. Wish List Through its discussions to date, the Committee has formulated the following "wish list" of online content and services it feels would benefit Society Members, the Society, and the Information Theory Community more broadly. These features are listed in no particular order. * Central repository of online lectures. Full video (Koetter), or just audio synced with slides (Servetto) * HTML version of the Newsletter, or integrated Newsletter on the website (Tuninetti) * Integrate student website with main website (Servetto) * Semi-automated way to have links migrate from arXiv posting or personal website, conference paper on a specific site, conference paper on Xplore, and journal paper on Xplore (Sahai) * Comments section per paper in which people can: include equations in their posts using inline LaTeX; drop in a figure either in .eps or .pdf; add clickable cross-citations to other related work; cite online comments (perhaps by Society Members only?) in future papers. (Sahai) * An easy way for users to easily assemble collections of content (Sahai) * RSS feeds so that people can subscribe to what they want in a push format (Sahai) * Allow teachers to create course modules out of these posted content, a la Connexions (Sabharwal/Baraniuk) * Permanent hostnames for conferences, e.g., isit.org/2007/, itw.org/2007/, and www.itsoc.org/confs/isit/2007/, etc. (Kschischang) * Internationalization, mirrors (Sabharwal) Needed Functionality * LaTeX integration, even if limited syntax * User-contributed content with structure, not just a wide-open Wiki * Link migration or consolidation for a given publication across personal websites, arXiv, and IEEE Xplore * Unified search across multiple sites, including IEEE Xplore, arXiv, and Google Scholar * Replicated servers mirrored steaming (perhaps running BitTorrent?) * Disk space, e.g., bigger drives in the RAID arrays * Content production tools (video editing, audio editing, etc.) * Video cameras or videographer services * Scanners or scanning services Developer Interaction The Committee pursued several companies that specialize in development and support of Plone, the content manangement system (CMS) in testing by the Society for about a year at http://dev.itsoc.org/. Enfold Systems, represented by Toby Roberts, was the most responsive in forming the cost estimates below. It should be noted that Rice ECE used Enfold for its Department website, and their experience was positive, though the project took 2 extra months. The interaction with Enfold Systems was intended to obtain *ballpark* cost estimates for the *rough outline* of needed functionality summarized below. The exchange has not led to any agreements, or any promise of such, between the Society and Enfold Systems. As the Committee recommends above, detailed specifications should be developed, and several competitive bids should be obtained for more accurate cost estimates. Stated Goals The following was the rough list of desired features sent to potential developers, with the goal of establishing ballpark cost estimates and timelines. * Latex Integration - Our Society uses a lot of math to communicate, primarily Latex - We need Latex integration from the bottom up, e.g., in File objects, Discussions comments, etc. - Uploading PDF produced locally with latex does not seem to be the right approach, although an AJAX solution could be possible to avoid too much server processing - It should be dead easy to use, otherwise no one will use it * Paper submission, review, archive, and discussion - Combines features of * Submission & review systems (e.g., http://edas.info/ for conferences, Manuscript central for journals http://www.scholarone.com/) * arXiv.org timestamp/preprint/archive server * IEEE Xplore archive/index server (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp) * PKP Project OCS and OJS (http://pkp.sfu.ca/; Nice stuff, but all PHP/MySQL) - Allows * Maintenance of a reviewer database * Discussion of papers (See Latex bullet above) * Unified search across our site, arXiv.org, IEEE Xplore, other indices? * Bibtex citation generation * Heavy linking to IEEE Xplore once papers are published (Main income stream) - Nominal Workflow (Journal/Conference) * Author uploads paper, flags whether or not to release as preprint, enable discussion, etc. * Editor/TPC Chair assigns to Associate Editor/TPC Member * AE/TPC sends out to reviewers * Reviewers upload reviews * For journal, authors upload response and revised manuscript, if not rejected outright * Repeat for another round or two of review * AE/TPC decides to accept or reject paper * If accepted, paper moves on to Publications Editors for cleaning up, assigning to issue/session, etc. * Issue/Conference Program is released on the website, possibly with TOC earlier than papers themselves * Conference Management - Examples: www.isit2006.org, www.isit2007.org - Basic logistical information - Tools to help TPC assign papers to sessions, sessions to days/rooms, etc. - Conference program, driven by papers submitted to conference * Calendar form, with links to sessions and papers * PDF output. Be nice to connect to printed output, to avoid duplication of efforts - Be nice to have a search feature that flags talks for a user, allowing them to sort priorities among * Favorite Topics/Least Favorite Topics * Favorite Speakers * Papers that Cite My Work - Useful to have .ics download capability - Useful to be able to auto-generate a CD/DVD-ROM that will standalone (often a PDF index) * Lectures - Examples: media.itsoc.org - Lecture audio/video, slides - Quality/storage the key design parameter * International - Multi-lingual, as much as possible - Replicated servers in key regions, e.g., U.S., Europe, Asia - Backup/recovery strategies Cost Estimates The following cost estimates were obtained from Toby Roberts at Enfold Systems. These are only meant to serve as guidelines for what the desired functionality could cost. * Custom Look and Feel w/Plone: $35k * Content Migration: $5-25k (dependant on amount of need / Enfold involvement) * Latex Integration: $15-20k (portal_transform, tests, and quality assurance) * Paper submission, review, archive, and discussion: $75k * Conference Management: $60k * Lectures: $5k * International: $10-15k Project Duration Enfold estimates the project duration would be anywhere from 2 months (for basic Plone with custom look and feel + minor customizations) up to 5 months for everything, assuming "typical response" times by Society representatives. We could likely do a detailed requirements phase/study in June/July, and commence to full speed implementation in July/August. As long as we began in those timeframes we could launch before year end. Maintenance and Support Enfold offers support that works for nearly all of its clients. The cost is $650/month or $7,500/year. From Robert's email, "One of our goals is to empower you to do basic maintenance on the system to reduce your cost and allows us to do the things that add the most value. To that end, we like to integrate you / your staff as intimately as feasible in the project. This not only lowers your total project cost, but is also a much better alternative to only training you at the end of the project. We much prefer hands on learning/participation throughout the development process so you are able to more easily maintain and understand your system." Sabharwal suggested that, based upon the experiences at Rice ECE, the support agreement would be worth the investment of $7.5K in the first 2-3 years when the system/feature set is under test and has not stabilized. He also suggested that we build a warranty/guarantee into any potential contract to have the developer be on call to help make sure things go smoothly in the first six months of deployment.