Summary

Since CISS 2009, the now standing Online Committee has continued content migration from the legacy website(s) and has encouraged contributions and feedback through email announcements and a newsletter article. More than 450 people have registered with the site, over 100 news and event items have been submitted, and several committees and chapters have actively updated their section of the website. The site continues to receive over 200 visits/day, with nearly 17,500 unique visits from over 140 countries. Online Committee members are organizing a number of meetings during ISIT 2009 to move forward with the Membership & Chapters Committee, the Conference Committee, and the Newsletter Editor on new initiatives using the web infrastructure. Following ISIT, another round of software development will be pursued to fix bugs and deliver features to allow embedded conference websites and an online newsletter with articles containing mathematics.  In addition to its operating budget of $10K, the Online Committee recommends that the BoG approve an additional $15K for software development in 2009.

Usage Statistics

The Online Committee is using Google Analytics to collect usage statistics for the new website. These tools are extremely simple to use with the new website, and provide gobs of information about website usage (number of visits to the site, time on the site, browser capabilities, geographic location, and so on). The Online Committee's  data repository  contains many, many more details.  Since launching the site, we have the following cumulative results (2/9/2009-6/21/2009):

Comparative results in the last two months (4/24/2009-5/24/2009 and 5/25/2009-6/24/2009) are shown in the table below.

Community Engagement

The Online Committee has initiated a number of conversations with Officers and Committee Chairs about new web initiatives, e.g., membership and chapter development, conference websites, and a joint online / print newsletter.  These opportunities require a certain amount of "project management" to understand what is needed, translate those needs into requirements for our software developers, and work with the developers and end-users to make sure the resulting features work as expected.  Going forward, more members of the Online Committee will get involved in such project management, allowing more immediate attention and progress to individual projects.  Additionally, such project management will provide a useful training ground for future Online Editors.

The Online Committee will initiate specific projects at ISIT 2009 to expand the use of the website and develop ideas for features and capabilities that can be provided.  Members of the Online Committee will meet with the appropriate Officers and Chapter Chairs at ISIT 2009 to kickoff these projects, which are summarized further in the sections below.

Membership and Chapters

This project will expand outreach to chapter chairs to encourage use of the website for chapter organization and also to get ideas for new functionality.  The goal will be vibrant chapter webpages that are simple to maintain and update without requiring significant expertise in HTML / CSS.  Anand Sarwate from the Online Committee will lead this effort, working closing with Guiseppe Caire from the Membership and Chapters Committee.

Conference Websites

This project will assess whether the new website and the Online Committee can support the hosting and infrastructure for workshops and symposia websites (excluding paper submission and review).  The goals will be: simple, uniform development and archiving of conference websites; reasonable and consistent URLs without requiring domain registrations; and the ability to easily customize the "look" of conference websites relative to the main site.  Some progress in this direction has already been achieved with the websites for the past two Schools of Information Theory.  Matthieu Bloch and Jean-Francois Chamberland from the Online Committee will lead this effort, working closely with Bruce Hajek from the Conference Committee as well as organizers of upcoming workshops and symposia. 

Joint Online / Print Newsletter

This project will aim to develop a joint online / print newsletter.  The website and newsletter already solicit joint submissions of announcements, news items, and events.  The goals will be: expanding content and variety; accelerating distribution and reducing costs; and approximating the benefits of a magazine without requiring advertising. This project will be led by Amin Mobasher from the Online Committee and Tracey Ho from the Publications Committee.

New Content and Relationships

This project will focus on developing interactive content specific to the website, e.g., tutorials and reviews, paper discussions, and blogs. The goals will be making the website more interesting and useful to the broader community and attracting more traffic to the site. Related issues of corporate sponsorship, affiliates programs, and advertising will also be explored.  Mehul Motani from the Online Committee will lead this project.

Software Development

Based upon community requests and internal committee discussions such as those outlined above, the committee maintains a running list of potential new features for the website and works with the software developers to develop requirements and cost estimates.  Software development continues as needs require and funds allow.

Another important factor in prioritizing software development is the state of the open-source technology that underlies the new website.  In many cases, the basic operation of a given feature may be provided by an existing open-source module.  The Online Committee aims to leverage existing open-source modules to the greatest extent possible in order to keep development costs considerably lower than for fully custom solutions.

Using the Online Committee's operating budget of $10K for 2009, the table below lists the features currently slated for development this Summer.  Aside from bug fixes, these features are direct translations of requests for functionality from Officers and Committee Chairs and are aimed at supporting the initiatives outlined in the previous section.

Three important features not currently selected for development under the Online Committee's operating budget for 2009 are: Conference Events, Terms & Conditions, and Mail/Web Integration. Each of these features requires further specification with the software developers in order to provide accurate cost estimates, but current rough estimates of the development costs total $15K.  For these features to be pursued in 2009, the BoG would have to approve additional funds beyond the Online Committee's $10K operating budget.

Based upon the above discussion, the Online Committee hereby recommends that the BoG approve an additional $15K for software development in 2009.