2017 VGTC ExCom Meeting Minutes

  • Minutes taken by​: João Comba (VGTC secretary)
  • Date​: Tuesday October 3, 2017
  • Time​: 7:30pm – 9:25pm
  • Venue​: Phoenix Convention Center, Phoenix, AZ.
  • Attendees​: Claudio Silva, João Comba, Rachael Brady, Daniel Weiskopf, Penny Rheingans, Ross Maciejewski, Lisa Avila, Tamara Munzner, Loretta Auvil, Miriah Meyer, Jörn Kohlhammer, Hans Hagen, Tobias Isenberg, James Ahrens, Leila De Floriani, Holger Theisel, Miguel Encarnação, Anders Ynnerman, Klaus Mueller, Meghan Haley.
  • Agenda:
    1. Around the table introductions
    2. Status report from chairs
    3. Reports form sponsored conferences
    4. VGTC Chair elections
    5. Any new business

Minutes

Around the table introductions

  1. Thank outgoing members
  2. Welcome new members
  3. Term-limit committee
    • Who wants to be on it? 3 people
    • Not only check for VGTC term limits, but also help enforce term limit at sponsored events that are required to stay within VGTC limits

Status report from chairs

  1. Publications chair
    • more “traffic”
    • role/responsibilities of publications chair
    • issue of plagiarism
    • cross-linking EG DL and IEEE Xplore unsuccessful
    • maybe David Ebert and/or Leila can help here * PCS keywords dataset * paper templates * publication information and vgtc.org
  2. Finance chair
    • Funded Junior Faculty Summer Camp this summer, budgeted $5K, spent $4.5K
    • (​please fill here with complete details​)
  3. Industrial Relations chair
    • New version of the “Best Practices for Attracting Industrial Support”, available here: https://cloud-ext.igd.fraunhofer.de/s/iIwIYhbBqepsbXt
    • Feedback and/or dissemination welcome
    • Successful job fair model at VIS
    • Visualization in Practice plays a stronger role at VIS
    • Plans for better document and data organization to facilitate supporter attraction
    • Open: Better overview of the other VGTC conferences (except EuroVis) and their supporter needs and processes
  4. Webmaster
    • Conversion from old HTML to Markdown system is complete, submission of content happens the same as ieeevis.org
    • Inventory of other websites that are under some partial responsibility of VGTC needs to happen

Reports form sponsored conferences

  1. VIS ​2017 (Jim Ahrens)
    • 1002 registered, beyond target of 1K
    • 84K sponsorship, beyond target of 80K
    • pro event planner as crucial and most have large conf experience
    • mantras: keep it simple, no exceptions no surprises
    • scalable organization. all the docs are there.
    • inclusivity
    • new plenary awards opening
    • community: visbuddies to serve new people (1/3 new)
    • numbers roughly between 2013 (low/lean) and 2015 (high/flush).
    • estimate will have 40K surplus. would have been higher if not convention center plus hotel. f&b was set early, made right decision a few years back when did the contract signing.
    • hotel attrition was scary. could have been 50K, 70K, etc. two years running source of major stress. assumption about conference hotel isn’t true, world has changed with airbnb etc. need to change. he sends shaming/begging mail. that won’t work long term.
    • had a budget. for a few years page charges were 2K, 6K. then got mail saying it’s 40K for this year and past 4 years. thanks to leila for passing along (ieee cs still hasn’t sent us the invoice, only know this thanks to leila passing along as a headsup!)
    • arts: champagne tastes on a beer budget.
    • claudio: thanks. opening was amazing. one of the best he’s ever seen. also great content.
  2. VIS 2018 (Holger Theisel)
    • hotel negotiations are almost done
    • roster is completed
    • 100K supporters raised so far!
    • financial MOU is signed
    • differences: do not have event planner, use the magdeburg infrastructure
  3. VIS 2019 and 2020 (Tamara Munzner)
    • 2019: Vancouver, Oct 20-25, 2019. Brian Fisher general chair, vice co-chairs Alex Endert and Wes Willett. will return to event planning support from Nicole Finn of ctoc events.
    • 2020: Utah, general chairs Valerio Pascucci and Mike Kirby
  4. EuroVis
    • EuroVis 2017 in Barcelona, June 12th-16th, 302 attendees, EGPGV, EnvirVis, EuroRV3, EuroVa
    • EuroVis 2018 in Brno, June 4th – 8th
    • EuroVis 2019 in Porto
    • EuroVis 2020 in Norrköping, co-located with EuroGraphics
    • EuroVis awards structure being put in place

VGTC Chair elections

Claudio informed that the elections for the new VGTC chair is waiting the nomination of candidates from the VGTC directors.

Any new business

Claudio informed that he plans to have a VGTC meeting at the Virtual Reality conference.