[Sc_coordination] Re: [Coordination 2024] Preliminary feedback to Ilaria and Francesco

On 2 Nov 2023, at 09:49, Mieke Massink <mieke.massink(a)isti.cnr.it> wrote: Dear SC members, Many thanks for your timely responses and valuable suggestions. I have sent your feedback received so far in a first email to the PC Chairs with the idea to speed up the preparations of the conference. Please find the feedback sent to them so far at the end of this email. If there are any further suggestions I’m happy to forward them to Ilaria and Francesco. Please send me such suggestions before Friday, Nov. 3, afternoon. I’m also addressing some of your remarks: 1) Concerning the size of the SC now composed of 26 members. Yes, I agree. But let’s discuss this at another occasion, perhaps at the next conference. The (not very strict) rule that is currently in force is that members that do not participate to the conference 3 times in a row and are not actively and substantially contributing to Coordination in other ways are invited to leave the SC. 2) Concerning the gender balance of the SC. This would also better be discussed at the next conference. The imbalance is due to historic choices. At the start of Coordination it happened much more often that both PC Chairs were male. We are slowly rebalancing. 3) Concerning names of paper categories: personally I would prefer “regular” over “long”, also because the range of number of pages (7-15). I’ll suggest this to the PC Chairs. 4) 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: A) 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. B) 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. Please find below a copy of the email that I sent to the PC Chairs. Many thanks and Best regards, Mieke ==================== Answer to PC Chairs 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. - Furthermore, maybe it is possible to improve the description of tool papers as currently much content is between parentheses. - 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. - the link to the website is currently dangling. This should be fixed before it is distributed. Many thanks and Best regards, Mieke -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Mieke Massink Ph.D. - Senior Researcher FM&&T Group (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) C.N.R. - Area della Ricerca di Pisa - Ist. ISTI Via G. Moruzzi, 1 - I56124 Pisa, Italy Tel: +39 050 3152981 http://www1.isti.cnr.it/~Massink/ Fax: +39 050 3152040 E-mail: Mieke.Massink(a)isti.cnr.it ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction. We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” António Guterres, UN Secretary General, July 2022, at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, Berlin -- Sc_coordination mailing list sc_coordination(a)isti.cnr.it https://mailman.isti.cnr.it/postorius/lists/sc_coordination.isti.cnr.it/