Proposal for an ad hoc committee; mailing lists; change of web hosting.

Ad Hoc Committee for Web Services Proposal The OE proposes that the BoG constitute an Ad Hoc Committee for Web Services whose mission will be to establish a strategy for integrative use of the web by Society Members and for Society operations. Issues to be addressed by the strategy should include all areas that relate to web services, including but not limited to: * Communications, e.g., newsletter, mailing lists * Manuscript submission, review, discussion, and (perhaps) publication, e.g, arXiv, Xplore * Conference organization and management, e.g., EDAS * Capture and storage of archival content, e.g., old articles, out-of-print books, lecture videos * Member-contributed content, content management, e.g., Plone * Volunteer and vendor solutions, both software and support Motivation Our Society makes use of many web services, but largely not in integrative and/or consistent ways. As a few examples: * The Society maintains several mostly-static websites, e.g., "top-level page":http://www.itsoc.org/, "media page":http://media.itsoc.org, "students page":http://itsoc-students.ece.cornell.edu/. * "Pareja":http://www.itsoc.org/pareja/ is a web application used to submit and review manuscripts, "IEEE Xplore":http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ to view published papers, and many use "arXiv":http://www.arxiv.org/ to post and access preprints. There is little cross-linking among these resources. * Most conference organizing committees contract with a company to have their website developed and hosted on a site external to the main Society websites, e.g., "ISIT 2006":http://www.isit2006.org/ and "ISIT 2007":http://www.isit2007.org/. The mechanism for paper submission and review has fluctuated in recent years, and it is unclear how these resources are maintained beyond the conference dates. * A "development website":http://dev.itsoc.org/ has been exploring the use of a content management system (CMS) for various applications, e.g., Board of Governors repository. Given the above backdrop, one could conclude that Society web services are quite varied and complex. Indeed they are, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Compared to many of the web technologies in existence today (portals, search, wikis, math on the web, and so forth), most of these services are behind the times. These circumstances require comprehensive consideration by a committee of interested Members, with the objective of evaluating needs and recommending solutions for both the short and long term. Mailing Lists A mailing list server has been setup of "Email Services":http://lists.itsoc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/, using the "GNU Mailman":http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html software. Mailing lists allow people to send email to one address instead of 30(00), and also allow for web archives of the lists (either public or private). We can create a mailing list for BoG, Officers, and each Committee that wants one. Suggestions are welcome for what lists to create, privacy and archiving properties, and related policies. Web Hosting On Feb. 13, 2007, we received notice that our web hosting vendor will raise our hosting fees by ~15%, from ~$70/month to ~$80/month. Many of our static HTML files and our most critical web asset, Pareja, are currently run through a (virtual server) hosting environment at Web.com/Interland with 2 Gb of disk space. The current plan is to negotiate with the vendor to be more price competitive, or otherwise to change hosting companies as soon as possible/convenient. Mehul Motani suggested hosting.com as one option ["Link":http://hosting.com/hosting/vps/linux-vps-hosting.asp?sn=2], with a similar price point but 8 Gb of disk space.