XRDS Face-2-face
Discussion Team: Chris, Michael, Malay, James, Inbal, Erin, Tom, Ryan
AGENDA
1. How to involve the advisory board members in the activities of XRDS? Specially, getting inputs (articles, contacts of possible contributors, suggestions) from them for the magazine. [Malay, James]
2. Robust post-mortem of the three issues (Interaction, Programming, HC) published or in the way of publication in their new form. Specially, evaluating the advantages gained over the transformation from Crossroads to XRDS, limitations and problems. [Malay, James]
3. How to reform or improve XRDS to arrest the attention of more students. To be specific how to associate more students in its activities (not as editors but as contributors). [Michael, Chris, Malay, James]
4. Is there any need to redesign XRDS further? What will be the plans to expand the contents? I am stressing on including more varieties, i.e. increasing the pieces without increasing the number of pages. Publication cost and keeping the format restricted to the size 56+4 is a major issue. [Malay, James]
5. Would XRDS continue to be topic specific or be a general publication in future? Specially, how to make it distinguishable from CACM? How to make it confirm that XRDS has a special identity to the students instead of the presence of CACM? [Michael, Malay, James]
6. How to make the website of XRDS catchy? More contents there, more involvement of the students by posting new and attractive things? E.g., P != NP has been claimed to be proved last month by a researcher from HP Labs. There is no news on this in XRDS web portal. It is catchy information. So, web editors can play an important part in the game for XRDS. [Malay, James]
7. Fixing up the future issue topics that might be appealing to the students. [Malay, James]
8. Discuss ways to tailor the feature articles to our audience. As it is, the feature content in XRDS is essentially the same as what might appear in CACM, except it is edited by students and themed by issue. This has served us well and has several benefits, but in some sense, why not just read CACM rather than XRDS if you’re looking for magazine-style CS research? (Lots of students get both.) I wonder if we can push ourselves to make it a more unique publication. Maybe we try to get the features to showcase student research, which gives grad students a platform to get some publicity? [Michael, Chris]
9. How to raise awareness to XRDS in particular, and to ACM student-membership in general, in countries such as Israel/India where there’s active CS research but no/limited active ACM (or other) student community. [Inbal, Malay]
10. Any chance of getting professional copyediting in future issues? [Inbal]
11. Inviting guest editors (new)