2023Q1 Reports: PCC

PCC co-chair and Members:

Graeme Hirst’s term of office as co-chair to the PCC finished at the end of 2022. On the 1st of January Dan Bikel joined Donia Scott as co-chair and Graeme Hirst assumed the new post of Past Chair.

No new members have joined the committee; instead, we have extended the term of office of two colleagues whose membership was due to expire. We continue to have a full complement of members.

Number of Cases:

We have concluded two cases relating to harassment through intemperate on-line behaviour. One was resolved through mediation. The other resulted in the sanction of a ban on participation in ACL or ACL-related activities for 18 months. There are currently no active cases.

Policy update:

Our review of the Anti-Harassment Policy and the procedures document is about to begin.

Links between the PCC and other ACL committees:

We are liaising with the ACL Conference Officer, who is updating the Conference Handbook.

Outstanding Issues:

We await a response from the ACL Exec on the following issues raised in our Q3 report of last year:

Conflict of Interest Policy

Conflicts of interest (CoI's) arise from previous collaborative or personal relationships.  ACL's Conflict of Interest policy requires all reviewers, area chairs, and program chairs to determine and disclose potential CoI's in reviewing and decision making, and to not review or participate in the acceptance decision of any paper for which they have a conflict of interest.   

We would like to ask the Exec to verify that the COI policy is efficiently implemented for TACL, the CL Journal, and the new rolling review set up. We ask that the Exec inform the PCC when this is complete. 

  

Record Keeping

We have learned that the ACM has established a ‘violations database’ which tracks information about sanctions that is critical in their implementation of their anti-harassment policy. We propose that ACL should ask ACM for details of how they have set this up, to see what we can adopt. Further details: https://sigchi.org/2021/05/the-new-acm-violations-database/