Program Committee Chair Manual

Assemble the Team

The first task as program committee chairs is the assembly of the rest of the program committee. This consists of two groups, the mini-symposium chairs and the abstract reviewers.

Mini-symposium chairs should be recruited as soon as possible. The mini-symposium address scientific python in a domain-specific sub-community. It is the mini-symposium chair’s role to encourage participation from their community, select talks for the session, and organize the content of the session. The content and organization of the session is left up to the discretion of the mini-symposium chair. In the past, they have consisted of a series of talks, panel discussion, “state of the community”, or a combination of the above. Since a large amount of growth of the conference comes from the recruitment in these sub-domains, it is important to get the mini-symposium chair engaged early on.

The duties of reviewers on the program committee are not as extensive as the mini-symposium chairs, but they are very important. A large number of reviewers are required to address the increasing number of submissions. The number of reviewers to be recruited can be computed as:

r = s * 3 / (10  * (1 - a))

where r is the number of people to recruit as reviewers, s is the expected number of submissions, and a is the expected attrition rate. Each submission should have three reviews, and ten reviews is a reasonable expectation from a reviewer. The attrition rate depends on the set of reviewers – it is approximately 0.3.

Track and Conference Theme Selection

In the past the conference has been divided into one General track and two tracks related to the main themes of the conference. The themes should be selected based on feedback from the community and the interests of the chairs. Good themes are related to “what’s hot”, have broad appeal, and have a strong Python community. The mini-symposium themes are determined by the domain those willing to serve as mini-syposium chairs. Four to five mini-symposia have been held per-conference in the past.

Decide on a Calendar Dates

Adequate time needs to be given for program deadlines. Working from the start of the conference backwards:

  • At least two months should be allowed before the conference starts to when the speaker and poster schedule is announced. The schedule attracts people to the conference and allows attendees to plan their attendance. ae.

  • Approximately two weeks before the schedule announcements, the deadline for reviews should be planned to allow the PC chairs time to create the schedule.

  • Approximately three weeks prior, the abstracts should be distributed to reviewers to give them sufficient time to review.

  • Two weeks prior, the deadline for abstracts submissions should be place. This allows a week for a deadline extension and a week to sort abstracts to distribute to reviewers.

  • Approximately three months prior, the call for conference abstracts should be made to give submitters sufficient time to prepare their abstract.

Preparation of the Call for Abstracts

The call for abstracts should be reviewed by the conference chairs, communitation chairs, and the proceedings chairs. The call for abstracts should contain:

  • A general description of the conference.

  • The main themes of the conference.

  • The domain-specific mini-symposia themes.

  • Deadline dates.

  • Links to previous years websites.

  • Formatting and content requirements.

  • Selection process and rubric description.

The Conference Abstract Selection Process

Conference abstracts are scored by the reviewers with criteria on a 1-10 scale. The abstracts are ranked by an overall score created by combining the normalized, weighted scores from all reviewers. After the mini-symposium chairs have selected the submissions they would like to use in their session, the talk schedule is filled with the highest rank scores provided the submission desired a talk. Special circumstances, such a balance between tracks, more than one talk by the same author, and the comments by the reviewers are only taken into account one the schedule starts to fill up. Posters are similarly selected from the ranked scores.

Abstract Decision Emails

Decision emails to all submitters should contain:

  • Author names.

  • Title.

  • Talk/poster/rejection decision.

  • Instructions with talk duration and poster size.

  • Reminder that all attendees must register.

  • Proceedings instructions.

  • A notification that more slots may open up.

  • A request for confirmation of attendance.

Then, attendance needs to be tracked, and the schedule adjusted accordingly.