Up to the end… Annual Convention Proposals and Review

Mike Ryckman, Director of Organizational Development

This is always an exciting time of year at ISA Headquarters. With our June 1st submission deadline, we definitely have a lot going on toward the end of May and in early June. Our members and convention participants are often curious about what all this looks like on our end; so, I thought you’d like to see a brief picture of what we see this week and the work coming this summer.

The Totals

First off, ISA’s Annual Convention has become increasingly popular. In the last few years, the number of people submitting to our convention has increased significantly.

People on Submissions:

• New Orleans (2010) – 5,692
• Montreal (2011) – 6,353
• San Diego (2012) – 6,917
• San Francisco (2013) – ~7,500 (we have some duplicate records to comb through)

Standalone Papers Submitted:

• New Orleans (2010) – 2,878
• Montreal (2011) – 3,213
• San Diego (2012) – 3,818
• San Francisco (2013) – 3,949

Note: these “standalone papers” numbers don’t include papers submitted as a part of a submitted panel. This year, we had about 700 constructed panels submitted, each with about 5 more papers. In total we had over 8,700 unique submission records!

New this year, we have added the “Junior Scholar Symposium” to the ISA conference line-up. These events involve many people from throughout ISA’s leadership, and beyond, to provide a focused environment for junior scholars participating at the conference. We are excited to announce that we had over 270 JSS proposals come in this year. We hope to build on this success and expand the program even further in Toronto in 2014.

Thank you all for your support and participation in the conference – it is your work that really makes this such a great organization!

Right up to the end…

With all the warnings we give to our students about turning in assignments at the last minute, you might think we would see a steady stream of submissions throughout the month of May. In actuality, most of the submissions come in at the very end: we usually get about 40% of all of our submissions on the very last day!

If you ever feel like MyISA is running a little slow when you’re trying to submit your paper, remember, we have more users online that day than almost any other time of year. The only time we get more traffic is the day we announce the program in September.

So far this May, we’ve had 20,980 visits to MyISA by 9,450 unique devices! Next year, we are moving to a new system on a new server; hopefully, it will run better than ever.

Along with all these visits to the site, we get a lot of questions. Headquarters has fielded many hundreds of calls and emails helping users with everything from technical questions to policy clarifications. The Program Chairs, who manage their own email account, have been similarly swamped with questions.

1,687,508 Words to Review!

The task of reviewing these many thousands of proposals falls to our dedicated (and volunteer) Section Program Chairs and Convention Program Chairs. For the San Francisco convention, the abstracts and titles together total 2,941 single-spaced pages of text containing 1,687,508 words!

The ISA program is built over the course of the summer by our conference program chairs. During June and early July, they review these thousands of proposals. Section chairs assemble panels, recommend panel chairs and discussants, and estimate room size requirements. This information is given to the Convention Program Chairs (who act as section chairs for all of the “theme” proposals as well) to place the panels into slots on the program.

ISA typically has over 1,000 panel slots. These slots are filled by the program chairs in late July and early August. This gives time for a thorough review of the program before we make announcements in mid-September. This year, we are announcing the program on September 20th.

The Section Program Chairs and Convention Program Chairs work hard every year to put on the best conference possible. Although they can’t please everybody, they work hard to put out a great product. So, please remember to thank these committed volunteers who take on this monumental task; also, please be patient, if you email and don’t hear back right away, it’s probably because they have a million or so words left to review...