The website is running fairly smoothly and consistently.   We are seeing slight growth in traffic in the US, which currently dominates in terms of visitors, but much more substantial growth in traffic in many other countries.

The Online Committee is preparing for a new Chair / Online Editor in 2011, as Laneman has decided to step back to an editorial role after the leadership role of the past 4 years.  In addition to delegating sections of the website to various editors, the Online Committee is working with other committees to incorporate the website into their task lists and to help Society members contribute and use content.

The Online Committee expects to operate close to its annual $10K budget for 2010.  If the Society anticipates a surplus for 2010 without too many other demands, the Online Committee has additional features that could be developed to continue enhancing Conferences, Lectures, Collaboration, and Email Integration.  Going forward, the Online Committee could pursue options for generating revenue from the website through prudent sponsorship and advertising.

Highlights of Google Analytics since launch (2/9/2009 - 6/10/2010):

Comparing May 2009 and May 2010 traffic, visits are up 15% overall, time per visit is down 15%, and the percentage of new visits is down 20%. Non-US visits are up more substantially in many counties as illustrated in the following table.

Members of the Online Committee have been stepping up to take the reigns on various aspects of website communications and operations of the Society.

Laneman has been slowly taking a step back from development efforts with SixFeetUp to bring others up to speed on the process. Bloch is leading the development efforts for the following updates:

Estimates for the following features are being developed with SixFeetUp.

With our sizable membership and website traffic, there could be opportunities for the website to generate surpluses in the way similar to conferences and workshops.

• Summary
• Traffic Update
  • 132,185 visits, 176 countries
  • 271 visits / day
  • 3 min / visit
  • 41% are "new" visits
  • Search engines generate 56% of traffic
• Organizational Update
  • Registrations . The website has 846 registrations. Following the decision of the BoG, the policy is now allow the registration of Members only, with the exception of people contributing to the website content (students attending the School of IT for instance). A complete statement of the policy is available at http://www.itsoc.org/about/membership/registration-for-website/
  • News . Our news reporting team of Tracy Ho, Amin Mobasher, and Stefan Moser has been generating news items for various announcements throughout the year, and they are already working on news items for awards and honors announced at ISIT.  We continue to solicit news, announcements, and events for both the Newsletter and the website.
  • Conferences .  In coordination with the Conference Committee, we are encouraging organizers of upcoming workshops and symposia to consider hosting their websites within the new website following the path blazed by the IT School for the past few years.
• Development Update
  • Conferences : The Online committee has pursued its efforts to integrate conference websites within the existing infrastructure. Based on last year's positive experience, the Third Annual School of Information Theory is again hosted within the main website ( School of Information Theory ). However, the School website is now a "child" website" whose structure is independent of the main website. This new capability simplifies urls tremendously and provides more visibility. Presently, the visual appearance of child-websites is that of the main site, but the committee is exploring the possibility of customizable templates.
  • Lectures : Over the years, the IT Society has accumulated many videos of plenary lectures and Shannon lectures, and school lectures. Most of the videos are hosted on http://media.itsoc.org but are not always accessible easily. To provide better visibility and make sure these lecture are accessible to a wide audience, the Online Committee has been working with SFU to develop a "Lecture" object for the website. Development is still under way, but a preview is accessible on [ADD LINK]. Lectures will also listed on a member's profile.
  • Maintenance : As the content of the website grows, it becomes critical to establish a robust backup strategy. SFU currently backs up our site database regularly, and we are exploring options for automatically replicating backups to the server running http://media.itsoc.org/ .
• Potential Future Developments
  • Sub-Events:   [$1000 discovery estimate, most likely $2500 total]  The website offers the possibility of advertising events by having them displayed on the home page. However, to maintain a certain visibility, events are restricted to "sizeable" ones such as conferences or events directly related to the operation of the Society.   The Online committee has engaged in discussions with SFU to develop "sub-events" that would only be displayed within certain folders of the website. Applications of these sub-events could include talks and seminars within a chapter, talks and sessions in a workshop, etc.
  • Videos:  [$800 estimated, most likely $2000 total]   The Online committee is exploring the possibility of archiving videos in a more consistent and sustainable way. Presently, videos are stored on http://media.itsoc.org in various formats. The goal would be to embed videos in the the Lecture objects of the website (with a player similar to that of Youtube) while still hosting the videos on other servers like Vimeo to alleviate the load on itsoc.org. The benefits of this embedding would be twofold: 1) better visibility and archiving of videos and 2) faster upload and dissemination to the community. The committee has engaged in discussions with SFU to identify the best options.
  • Light collaboration tool:  [$500 estimated]   Presently, all emails send to [email protected] are directed to the Chair of the Online committee who then dispatches the request to the committee. To increase reactivity and responsiveness, the committee is exploring the possibility of a lightweight collaboration tool. Although this improvement would not be visible to most users, the committee believes that the IT community would benefit indirectly from this feature.
• Generating Revenue
  • Sponsorships: Our conference websites devote space to logos of sponsors who contribute funds to support the organization of the conference.  We could pursue something similar as an umbrella sponsorship of the Society website, but would not want to interfere with conference sponsorships.
  • Advertising: Many members of our community regularly write or contribute to books and research monographs. Since Cambridge University Press and Now Publishers often have a boot at our flagship conferences, we could explore the possibility of advertising those books relevant to the community on our website.  Another more delicate option would be to sign up for Google AdSense .