[Sc_coordination] Re: Answer by Ilaria and Francesco to your feedback

Dear Mieke, thank you for your detailed feedbacks. We reply below to the various points. Il giorno gio 2 nov 2023 alle ore 09:49 Mieke Massink <mieke.massink(a)isti.cnr.it> ha scritto: Dear Ilaria and Francesco, Last Monday I forwarded your proposal for the PC and draft CfP to the Steering Commission. Below please find the first set of suggestions. More people may still follow-up on my email, but I wanted to share the feedback received so far already with you in order to speed-up the preparations for the conference. I’m happy to inform you that almost all members that responded so far agree with most of the proposal and with the proposed members for the PC. On the latter there was a slight concern about the gender balance. (It was remarked that the proposed PC has 11/23 female-to-male ratio, which is kind of underwhelming. True, this is very close to the ratio we had in 2020 (9/18) but last year it was already 12/17, which is much better.) The SC expresses their gratitude for you hard work. We agree with this comment and we have revised the list of PC members accordingly (see the attached Excel file). Please, let us know your opinion about the modified PC (we tried to improve gender balance and reduce the number of people from Italian institutions). There have also been a few suggestions for improvement and some minor suggestions (see below). - Concerning the requirements for artefact submissions and EAPLS badging. The information on this procedure is currently missing but should be inserted also in the first version of the CfP. The guidelines document that you received some time ago provides clear indications on how to do this. These guidelines have been discussed and agreed upon by the SC. In particular, at the end of the guidelines document you find some helpful definitions and principles concerning artefacts badging. In particular: 1) Following ACM’s definition, an artifact is “[a] digital object that was either created by the authors to be used as part of the study or generated by the experiment itself. For example, artifacts can be software systems, scripts used to run experiments, input datasets, raw data collected in the experiment, or scripts used to analyze results. 
 2) COORDINATION accepts regular papers and tool papers. For both kinds of papers AE is voluntary. To improve and reward reproducibility and to give more visibility and credit to the effort of tool developers in our community, authors of accepted (regular and tool, short and long) papers will be invited to submit publicly available (using permanent repositories such as Software Heritage, Zenodo, etc.) artifacts associated with their paper for evaluation, and based on the result of the evaluation they may be awarded one or more badges. See EAPLS Artifact Badges for details. Artifact submission is optional and the result of the artifact evaluation will not alter the paper’s acceptance decision but may impact the decision on best papers. Detailed guidelines for the preparation and submission of the artifacts will be made available. The rules for artefact submission and badging should be clearly mentioned in the CfP and on the web-site of Coordination. We will improve the CfP accordingly. Anyway, we would like to discuss this matter also with the AE Chair. Therefore, we are going to first invite Rumyana as AE Chair. Some minor suggestions: - Some found the use of the term “long” sounds strange. Most conferences just call them “regular papers”; calling them “long” may be confusing. In fact, the length of the “long” paper is from 7-15 pages. So “regular” might be a better term. Ok. Furthermore, it was suggested to put tool papers as the last in the order as they have a longer description and are considered orthogonal to the other categories. Ok. Someone suggested to be also a bit more tolerant on the maximal length of a paper and, say accept a paper that is 10% longer if this is beneficial for the clarity of the paper. One could make this explicit in the CfP and require authors to inform the PC Chairs about such a case. We are a little puzzled about this suggestion. Instead, we propose to directly and explicitly increase for everybody the page limit to 17 pages for regular papers. What do you think? - Furthermore, maybe it is possible to improve the description of tool papers as currently much content is between parentheses. Ok. - There was some concern about requiring a 10 minutes video in addition to an artefact would not ask too much of the authors. As far as I remember, the video in the past was required only for short tool papers. We have replaced "must" by "may" for this requirement. Anyway, the last year the video was required for both long and short tool papers. - the link to the website is currently dangling. This should be fixed before it is distributed. Sure, we will ask Jorge. Best regards, Francesco & Ilaria