Minutes from the SoCG 2013 business meeting, Rio di Janeiro, Brazil, June 18, 2013. Taken by David Eppstein, secretary, SoCG Steering Committee. See also the slides from the presentations at the meeting, at http://www.computational-geometry.org/documents/SOCG2013-business.pdf Jeff Erickson (chairing the meeting as chair of the SoCG steering committee) began the meeting by showing two charts that he had previously posted to Google+, plotting attendance against the number of submissions and number of acceptances, with curves connecting the points for successive years. There was no visible correlation between the variables. He then gave an overview of the actual agenda for the meeting. The first agenda item was the report from local arrangement chair Thomas Lewiner. He thanked all helpers and institutional supporters. The number of participants was similar to previous years, but the number of student attendees was higher than usual, likely because the student registration fees were unusually low. Thomas then gave us a breakdown of the conference budget, detailing the measures he took to keep the registration fees low, including keeping as much of the budget as possible associated with CG week instead of SoCG itself to reduce the overhead from ACM. Next, Timothy Chan presented the report from the program chairs. There were 162 abstracts submitted, which eventually became 137 full paper submissions and 48 accepted papers; the acceptance rate of 35% was not significantly different from the previous year. All papers were reviewed by at least three committee members; Timothy also presented statistics for the number of committee comments per paper, hinting at a possible power law (one paper had 38 comments, but the average was approximately three). He presented the usual statistics of numbers of submissions and acceptance rate by numbers of authors (one and five were this year's lucky numbers), country, and topic area, and thanked the world for its help in the reviewing process. Timothy presented the best paper award to Raimund Seidel and Victor Alvarez for their work on counting triangulations. Raimund (accepting the award) remarked that he wasn't sure the paper would even be accepted so he was very pleasantly surprised to learn of the win. Alex Kröller reported from the video/multimedia program. The committee members were almost all European so to enable a physical committee meeting the lone holdout, Michael Hemmer in Israel, was given a new job in Braunschweig. The committees goals were to increase the artistic and technical qualities of the program, to avoid videos that came across as recorded talks (voice over powerpoint slides), and to cut through the previous confusion of multiple file formats. They standardized on HD video submissions, required to be uploaded to YouTube, and they report that this worked very well. From six submissions there were four acceptances, one reject, and one "maybe" requiring significant revision before its eventual acceptance. They also took efforts to disseminate the videos more widely than previously, including collecting them at imaginary.org, a site dedicated to mathematical visualization. In the absence of workshop chair Jean-Daniel Boissoinat, Jeff presented the report from the satellite workshop program of CG week. Three workshop proposals were submitted and all were accepted; the low number of submissions was likely because of the remote location. Bettina Speckmann discussed the workshop she ran, the Young Researchers Forum; in that workshop, all twelve submissions were eventually accepted, but five of them required major revisions. She said that timing the workshop submissions after EWCG was helpful in keeping the numbers high. Jeff thanked the outgoing steering committee members. Next on the agenda was a presentation by Takeshi Tokuyama on preparations for next year's conference in Kyoto. Like this year, it will run for four days, from June 8-11. The PC will be co-chaired by Siu-Wing Cheng and Olivier Devillers; Olivier presented the full list of PC members. Jeff announced that the best paper will be invited to JACM, and that starting next year NSF will be providing travel support for American students and postdocs (as they have been doing at STOC). Pat Morin, one of the managing editors of the Journal of Computational Geometry, presented a proposal that the SoCG Steering Committee act as an advisory board for JoCG, and offered JoCG as a publisher of special issues from SoCG. Both of these proposals have also been discussed by the steering committee. The special issues are usually arranged by the PC chairs; although DCG has usually (always?) had one of them, other special issues have also been published in the past in CGTA and IJCGA. There was much discussion, and a straw vote, on a proposal to colocate with STOC in 2016 (as a much more lightweight effort than past FCRC conferences, with details to be worked out by the steering committees). This had already been discussed at STOC where it reportedly gained strong support. Jeff ran the discussion and answered several audience questions. Q (Pankaj Agarwal): Who would run local arrangements? A: For now the steering committees but we would hope to find someone local. Q (Dave Mount): Will our vote be binding? A: At this point it will be only advisory but by next year it needs to become a firm decision. Q: Is this a one-time thing or an on-going series? A: It could possibly be repeated every three or four years, and we could possibly also consider colocation with some other relevant conferences (one in computational topology was mentioned). Q: How would the conferences overlap in timing? A: STOC and CCC colocated recently and had disjoint scheduling for their main talk sessions but other parts (like our satellite workshop) overlapped. Q: How will the final decision whether to do this be made? A: The steering committee if it seems obvious, a community vote otherwise. Q: What happened with FCRC? Why were we unhappy and what is different this time? A: Jeff reviewed the history here. Q: How long would the whole conference be? A: Maybe 7 days Q: How would this affect the timing of SoCG in the calendar? A: STOC is usually held earlier than SoCG so this might cause us to be a couple of weeks earlier than usual. Q: Would there be joint conference registration? A: Probably not but registration for one conference might give the participants visiting privileges in the other. It would likely be a little more expensive than usual because of this. Q: Who will lead the bidding for locations? A: We would solicit joint bids and likely decide among them in the steering committee. Q (Pankaj again): Have you talked to Dick Karp @ the Simons Institute re hosting this? A: Not yet. At this point we held a straw vote on whether this all seemed like a good idea. The audience was unanimously and strongly in favor. Next, Jeff made some announcements that had been contributed by other related conferences. The penultimate agenda item was the bidding for who would host SoCG in 2015. There were four bids, received in the order - Braunschweig, Germany (Sandor Fekete et al) - Portland, Oregon, USA (John Hershberger) - Eindhoven, Netherlands (Bettina Speckmann) - Brisbane, Australia (Benjamin Burton) The bids were presented in alphabetical order, following which we intended two rounds of voting: one round in which everyone could vote for two bids, followed by a second round between the top two bids from the first round in which everyone would only have one vote. However, the vote counts from the first round were Braunschweig 25, Brisbane 26, Eindhoven 40.5 (Jeff and I didn't get the same vote count), and Portland 25. At this point Jeff decided to change the second round to be a yes-or-no vote on Eindhoven. There were 36 yes votes and 25 no votes, so Eindhoven was selected. Finally, we reached the issue of our affiliation with ACM, the subject of two recent electronic votes (the most recent one 60-40 in favor of leaving ACM). Jeff thanked several people for their advice, summarized the past history (including in-cooperation status with ACM in 2007 and 2009, and ACM's refusal to grant this status in 2011 leading to several bad consequences including failure to sign a contract until 2013 and some funds being reclaimed by the French government before they could be used to balance the conference budget), and also summarized the open access issues (ACM seems to have their heart in the right place but are still doing things that we and they know are not the right way to do it, such as the $1500 fee to make a paper open access). Q (Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson): How does this relate to recent examples of papers kicked out of ACM conferences for having previously been released as public domain? A: Their general attitude on this sort of issue seems to be one of don't ask don't tell. The author of that paper had released the paper as public domain and then refused to sign the copyright form because, having made the paper public domain, he had no right to sign over the copyright to ACM any more. The paper did not appear in the proceedings but the conference organizers managed to get a page inserted into the printed copies of the proceedings explaining the situation. Jeff stated that his attitude had been that, unless ACM's position had significantly changed, we should not re-vote the question of ACM affiliation. However, he believes that their position has significantly changed: in particular, Paul Beame has agreed that in-cooperation status will be available for instances of the conference held outside the US. Jeff proposed that we reconsider the issue by holding one more vote, with the options being either to stay with ACM and continue to allow in-cooperation status with ACM for non-US conferences (and if they deny it then we immediately leave ACM), or to just leave ACM now. He additionally proposed that there be no additional reconsideration of the issue for five more years. In preparation for this discussion he has set up a new web site makingsocg.wordpress.com, where various position statements and discussions would be posted (including a written record of ACM's position), following which we would hold an electronic vote throughout the month of October. Q (Suresh Venkatasubramanian): Can you expand on the issue of the conference name? A: ACM owns the trademark on "Symposium on Computational Geometry", so our working assumption should be that if we leave we will have to change our name. Q: What about "SoCG"? A: ACM has lawyers and we don't. However, COLT did become independent while keeping their name. Q (Lars Arge): Who are the key players in ACM and what do they think? Paul Beame will not be in place there permanently. A: That's why we need a permanent record of their statements. Q (Lars): The problem is that ACM wants to make money off of their conferences. They are expanding in Europe, and that expansion threatens the continued availability of in-cooperation status. A: Yes. Q (Thomas Lewiner): Because of the separate finances of CG:APT they are not getting much from us this time. A: But getting that to work requires a lot of jumping through hoops. Lars: When SoCG 2009 (in Aarhus, organized by Lars) did in-cooperation status, he got the impression from the tone of their responses that they were hostile to the idea. Q (Günter Rote): Did the proceedings (on CD-ROM, not printed) cost anything this time? A (Thomas L.): Not clear yet. A (Jeff): Concerning in-cooperation status, there is a proposal from SIGACT that they cover the extra expenses that ACM would normally charge relative to an ACM-sponsored conference. However, adding a paper to ACM's digital library has real costs (estimated at $400 per paper and largely covered by library subscriptions but if open access causes libraries to stop subscribing these costs would still need to be covered). At this point we adjourned.