Online Committee Report, ITA 2010, San Diego

Summary

As the new IT Society website celebrates its first birthday (launched at ITA 2009), the Online Committee is proud of what we have accomplished both technically and organizationally.  Our goal for 2010 we will be to continue making the website useful and valuable for members of the IT community.  The focus will be more on "editing" than software development and system administration, helping organize more interesting content (especially plenary lecture videos and slides), facilitate more volunteer use of the website, and document best practices.

Numbers

Highlights of the  Google Analytics report  through 2/9/2009 - 1/29/2010:

  • 94,160 visits, 166 countries
  • 259 visits / day
  • 3 min / visit
  • 51% are "new" visits
  • Search engines generate 61% of traffic

Ongoing Projects

Reorganization

After receiving input from the BoG, the structure of the website has been reorganized to improve visibility and simplify access to some content. In particular:

  • "Awards and Honors" is now a top-level tab accessible from the home page. In addition, some awards and the call for nominations now appear in the slideshow.
  • The "Conferences" directory has been updated and its organization simplified; upcoming conferences are now automatically listed and past ISITs and ITWs are automatically archived. New guidelines have been posted ( Website Submission Instructions and Guidelines ) and a short tutorial is available ( Creating a Conference Event )

In the near future, the "Resources" tab will be reorganized to provide better visibility of lectures, etc. As part of this effort, the Online Committee is still investigating the possibility of integrating LaTeX support into the website and pushing the development of a "Lecture" object with SFU.

 

New Content, Faster Access

With this year's emphasis on "editing", the Online Committee will seek to identify the most useful types of content for the community in general, but especially for students and beginning researchers.  We anticipate that videos and slides of plenary lectures, tutorial articles, area overviews and reference list, lecture notes and other courseware, will be the highest priority.
 
After prioritizing content, the Online Committee may post an announcement for some sort of award for developing the most useful piece of new content in 2010, as measured by views or downloads. The award could be an Apple iPad or $500 gift certificate to Amazon that could be counted as part of the Online Committee's operating budget.  The BoG may consider creating a more formal award for contributions to the Society's website that would be be highlighted under the "Awards" tab like the Best Student Paper Award at ISIT.
 
As new content becomes available, it will be very important to make it more visible and easier to navigate.  This may require some rethinking of the current "Resources" tab on our main homepage.  We may also want to create specialized pages for certain member types, e.g., "Staring IT" that might link to Bob Gallager's lecture, the most popular book or set of lecture notes that are available online, and so on.
 
Most of the above content is already supported by the existing website software, but the Online Committee is pursuing a custom "content object" for lectures because of their importance at conferences and through the reinvigorated Distinguished Lecturers Program.  The Lecture object will provide a self-contained unit that will be easy to collect into a folder lectures and highlight randomly-selected lecture on the Society homepage.

Newsletter / Web Integration

The Online Committee continues to work with the Newsletter Editor to create a joint solicitation, submission, and editing process for news, announcements, and events lists.  The Newsletter Editor is listed as an ex officio member of the Online Committee, additional news editors have volunteered from the Online Committee, and additional contributors are being contacted for lengthier articles and content.

 

Conference Websites

The Online Committee pursues its investigations for simplifying the hosting and archiving of conference websites. The two main objectives for 2010 are

  • to integrate the plugin "Lineage" into the website, which will allow chosen sub-directories to appear as standalone websites while still being part of the overall structure; these sub-directories will have some customization capabilities (color theme, etc.)
  • to enable URL redirection for simplified access to content (for instance www.itsoc.org/school2010 instead of www.itsoc.org/people/committees/student/2010-school-of-it).

Following up on the reasonable success of the 2009 School of IT, the 2010 School of IT website will be used to test these new features. 

 

Email integration

At the moment the Society operates separate web services for its website and mailing lists.  The mailing lists are swamped by spam, delaying Online Editors' ability to moderate submissions for distribution to the community.  From the website, it is tedious to send an email to committee members to inform them about a new document that requires input or review.  The Online Committee is working with our software developers to address these issues, and may survey the membership to determine whether a standard mailing list remains necessary given the new website.

Budget

The Online Committee anticipates operating within its annual operating budget for 2010. The general feeling is that the current website functionality is way ahead of the community, and we need to throttle software development efforts by keeping them within our annual budget allocation.

If the Society has a surplus for 2010, we may want to consider additional funds to upgrade the web infrastructure to its latest version (Plone 4).  As with all open-source software, such upgrades provide security fixes and additional features generated by the broader Plone community and not just our contract software developers.  A detailed quote for such an upgrade would have to be developed, but we expect this could be pulled together in time for approval at the Allerton 2010 BoG meeting and for upgrades to be performed and funds to be spent before 2011.