|
Our planning team introduced a number of innovations for this year's Conference. We hope that many of these will be adopted by the Huntsville planning team, who will undoubtedly find ways to improve upon our innovations, as well as introduce their own. This briefing has been written to aid the Society in its oversight of Conference planning. As well, we hope that it will serve as useful background information for EC members when they find themselves in discussions with Conference attendees about the format of the Conference.
Use of Web-based services: Most large conferences in both academe and industry now use a Web-based approach to interactions with contributors and other registrants. The Society contracted with a company to provide a Web-based service for the collection, distribution and management of submissions from authors for all forms of contributions to the Conference program (e.g., abstracts, papers, tutorials, posters). Despite due diligence (e.g., checking references), the service provided by this particular company proved to be disappointing. It created tremendous frustration for both the planning team and contributors. Nevertheless, the concept is sound, and this year's frustration could be resolved by moving to an alternate service provider. The Society also contracted with a company, IPlanIt.com, to provide a Web-based registration service. This proved to be a much more positive experience. IPlanIt was reliable, extremely responsive to requests and made every effort possible to help our registrants. Undoubtedly, the Web-based service for registration could be improved upon; however, this would mainly require more forethought by the Conference planners to provide IPlanIt with a better understanding of our needs. The ideal solution would integrate all of the Web-based services in a single service.
Student travel bursaries: The long-term existence of the Society depends on attracting the active participation of more members from a younger generation of system safety professionals. To this end, ISSC '08 established a program for awarding travel bursary to qualified students who made a contribution to the Conference. The funds for these bursaries were generously provided by two special sponsors, GM Canada ($5,000) and Thales Canada ($9,000), for the specific purpose of encouraging students to pursue careers in the field of system safety. Of all the innovations introduced by our planning team, I especially hope that this one will prove to be an enduring legacy. We were a bit disappointed not to have seen evidence that individual chapters of the Society (except for the Eastern Canada Chapter) made any effort to seek out eligible students in their region who could take advantage of this opportunity. In particular, there was not a single application or inquiry from any U.S. student. This should be an unsettling fact for the EC in light of the goal of involving more participation from the younger generation of system safety professionals. If this innovation is repeated next year, we hope that individual chapters will take on the challenge of recruiting local funds and local students for such bursaries. A very worthwhile objective for the Huntsville team would be to double the number of students brought to the Conference on a bursary next year.
Peer-reviewed papers: At the "lessons learned" session in Baltimore last year, there was a consensus that an effort should be made to improve the quality of papers prepared for the Conference. This was not meant by anyone to be a criticism of the Baltimore team's effort; rather, the quality problem was recognized to be largely the result of being compelled to accept hurried last-minute submissions without sufficient time for revisions. Under the leadership of Rod Simmons, we created two tracks of papers in an effort to improve the quality of submissions and the final papers. For submissions to the "peer review" track, authors were required to submit a full draft of their paper. The draft was reviewed, and for those papers accepted in this track, comments provided to the author so that they could revise the paper. We also provided a second track of "forum" papers that followed the process used previously by the Society Conferences. We decided not to make any distinction in the program between peer-reviewed and forum papers, since this was not necessary to achieve our primary objective, i.e., to improve the quality of papers. The addition of a peer review process offers another important benefit; namely, to increase the likelihood of researchers to participate in our Conference, since a peer review process for papers is often an important factor in the decision of which conferences a researcher will attend.
Program committee: Another measure intended to increase the quality of Conference papers was the establishment of a program committee. Following the example of other conferences that already enjoy a reputation for consistently high-quality papers, we populated this committee with recognized experts from a variety of industries (and academe). The membership of this committee included qualified individuals who have not been closely involved in the activities of the System Safety Society, as it is important to make sure the gene pool remains diverse. The program committee should be distinct from the session chairs, who become involved in the process at a later stage. Our intention was to ensure that every paper was reviewed by several members of the program committee. However, we were unable to make full use of this committee for a variety of uninteresting reasons, e.g., delays and other problems caused by problems with our Web-based service for managing papers. If the Society aspires to achieve a reputation for consistently high-quality papers, then the establishment and use of a program committee will be essential for future Conferences.
Thirty-minute limit per paper: We noticed some informal feedback from people who have attended previous Conferences about the excessive duration of paper presentations. In response, we shortened the time allocated for the presentation of individual papers to just 30 minutes, i.e., 20 minutes for presentation, five minutes for questions and five minutes for changing/introducing presenters. There are mixed opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of this; therefore, this particular change should be regarded as an experiment for this year. We hope that this approach will motivate presenters to "get to the point" more quickly and more easily resist the temptation to be sidetracked. The success of this approach will largely depend on the effectiveness of session chairs in helping the presenters stay on track and also to help the presenter manage interruptions from the audience: e.g., participants who steal time away from the paper presentation with an impromptu mini-presentation in the guise of a question. (A better place for these impromptu mini-presentations will be the just-in-time sessions described later.)
Posters sessions: Borrowing an idea that is popular in many other conferences, we have created an opportunity for conference participants to display posters that communicate a concept via a combination of graphics and text. The high quality of most of these posters is largely due to the care and attention paid by our poster chair, Jim Ronback, in providing poster contributors with feedback and guidance. We see many important benefits to having posters at the Conference. The "one-on-one" nature of interaction during poster sessions draws in active participation by Conference participants who do not have a more formal contribution, such as a paper. It is also a great way to put the notion of "conferring" back into the concept of a "conference," especially for Conference participants who are not comfortable asking questions in front of a large group at the end of a paper presentation. The display of posters is also appreciated by Conference participants who need a break from sitting through many hours of paper presentations. Finally, the possibility of submitting a poster is a good alternative for those who have missed earlier deadlines for submission of abstracts. To recognize the importance that our planning team has placed on poster contributions, a Conference award for the "best poster" was presented in conjunction with the "best paper" awards.
next page »
|
