2020Q3 Reports: Member at-large / Information Officer
What's done
1. We have made very good progress on the standardization of ACL domains and conference websites. The ACL now controls and automatically renews the domains for most ACL chapters and many SIGs which should prevent domains from expiring accidentally. In addition, conference websites now use sub-domains instead of buying a new domain for every website which is expensive and may not even be available (see https://2020.emnlp.org, https://2021.eacl.org and https://2021.aclweb.org). Finally, most conference websites are now using static websites with mostly the same navigational design which makes it easy for the community to use the website.
2. We have set up an ACL organizational Office365 account which allows the ACL and conference officers to easily share documents and use Microsoft Forms which is more geographically inclusive.
3. We have set up an ACL organizational AWS account which is currently being used to host the ACL 2020 virtual conference website and will be used to back up the Anthology assets in the future.
4. Our organization GitHub account is going strong with conference website repos, anthology, and paper reviewing repositories all co-located in one place.
5. Our organizational Slack account has been invaluable for organizing ACL 2020 with dedicated channels for almost every aspect.
6. Most recently, I just figured out a way to link aclweb.org with Amazon's Simple Email Service which can allow us to send up to 50,000 emails in 24 hours. This might solve many of our bulk email issues.
What's still not done
1. ACL Fellows portal - we examined one external service but it didn't provide all the necessary features. We are evaluating whether we can simply use Office365 forms since it now allows file uploads. 2. New ACL website - the new website is ready from a technological point of view but not from a content point of view. How do we decide what content on the old website is important? We really need to the new website for more modern things like blog posts etc. from the publicity chairs. Perhaps we can keep the old website available at old.aclweb.org and ask the community to file issues about things from the old website they'd like on the new website.