Online Committee Report, ITW 2013

Report of the Online Committee

Summary

The website has been running consistently and smoothly since July. Most of the development during the past months has been spent on fixing various issues and bugs behind the scene. The Online Committee plans to focus on adding new features for end-users during the next round of development.
 
The main topics reported in this brief report include 
  • Social media
  • Plone upgrade
  • Videos embedding
  • Licensing
  • Analytics
 

Social media

The Online Committee has discussed with Six Feet Up various ways of expanding its use of social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, etc.). The recent Shannon centenary stamp initiative has shown the limit of our current system, as we are missing an easy way for people to disseminate information by sharing, or re-tweeting news items. The Online Committee is presently planning to add several additional features to the website:
  1. Ability to share news items and events on Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc by providing convenient links at the bottom of each page; an example is available at  http://sugarcane.org/sugarcane-benefits/diversification-of-energy-sources
  2. Ability to create news items from a Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn post
Key concerns of the Online Committee are 1) to integrate social media in a "non-intrusive" way, i.e. to avoid overloading the pages with unnecessary and unaesthetic details and 2) to make the management of social media as simple as possible, to avoid increasing the load of the Online Committee 3) not to overload "followers" with too many announcements. The Online Committee welcomes any feedback from the BoG, and is open to any suggestions.
 

Plone Upgrade

ITSoc has to consider upgrading our system from Plone 3 to Plone 4.2. While we could maintain the current system for a few more years, the benefits of upgrading to the latest version would include 
  • improved website responsiveness
  • fewer incompatibility issues for maintenance in the long term
We are still waiting for a concrete estimate from Six Feet Up, but the cost of the upgrade will be around 30 kUSD. The migration can be scheduled in several steps and over the course of several months.
 

Videos embedding

The Online Committee is still exploring how to best leverage our media resources. In the short term, we will enhance the Lecture object (see for instance here ) to embed a media player linking to files stored on media.itsoc.org. However, the Online Committee feels that this is not sustainable in the long term unless we develop clear strategies for licensing and hosting (see next topic).
 

Licensing

An important issue related to videos is the licensing we will use to make these videos public. Presently, all our media resources are handled in a rather informal way, usually by making sure that speakers have no objection to the posting of the videos, without worrying about copyrights, and ownership. As we increase the visibility of our media resources, the Online Committee feels that ITSoc should develop clear guidelines and rules. Licensing has concrete consequences on the management of media resources:
  • it determines whether we can host resources on third-party websites (vimeo, youtube, etc).
  • it determines if other people can reuse these resources, and under what conditions.
The Online Committee would like to suggest the creation of a sub-committtee to come up with a draft policy for the BoG. Since the implications of such a policy would have impact beyond online resources, the Online Committee is suggesting to make the sub-committee as broad as possible, possibly including the newsletter Editor and the EiC.
 

Analytics

The last five months of web traffic remain stable with over 300 visits/day. The traffic comes for 55% from search engines, 22% from direct traffic, and 19% from referring sites. 

Statistic 2/3/2013-7/7/2013 7/7/2013-9/9/2013
Visits 45,022 ( 23,061 unique) 19,038 ( 10,759 unique)
Pageviews 117,000  48,090
Pages/Visit 2.54 2.53
Bounce Rate 60% 60%
Avg. Time 00:02:12 00:02:08
New Visits 47% 48%

All of the above statistics may be self explanatory except for  bounce rate , which is the percentage of single-page visits. 

 

The following table shows the top 5 page views (not including the main page) of the website for the period 7/7/2013 to 9/9/2013.
 
Page name Pageviews 
Shannon centenary US postal stamp initiative 2,262
Information Theory paper award 908
upcoming conferences 825
Claude E Shannon award 812
2013 Shannon Award 589

The following table shows the top 10 countries from which visit originates  for the period 7/7/2013 to 9/9/2013.
Country Visits
 United States 6,774 
 India 1,257 
China  868 
Turkey  840 
Germany 808 
Canada 792 
Iran 616 
France 582 
Italy  407 
Japan  368