Specification Updates, Jan 13, 2021
The following features will be added to the spec on the Home page:
#10. In addition to collecting EDI data from the potential participants who indicate their interest in attending, the data must be collected in an anonymized way, but associated with the proposal. It should be made clear to the user that the information will not be directly associated to their identity, but is collected for statistical purposes. These statistics should be available to the organizers of the proposal, as well as staff and review committees.
#10.5. Some of the fields on the proposal submission form concern the subject matter of the proposal. Submitters will be asked to choose the AMS Subject Classification that their proposal falls under. They are given a primary subject, a secondary subject, and a third, "BIRS Subject", which is our local list of subjects that change often (see Staff Features #11).
BIRS also maintains a list of experts that it calls upon to do proposal reviews. Each "Reviewer" should have subject area expertise associated to them.
After the Proposal Submitter has selected the subjects of their proposal, they should be asked to select which member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) committee should be the "Handling Editor" for their proposal. Each member of the SAB will have a list of subject areas associated to them, so that the proposals subject areas can be matched with the SAB members' subject areas, and the Proposal Submitter can be shown a list of candidates to be the Handling Editor.
Additionally, the proposal submitter should be able to mark any potential SAB members as "not applicable" for handling this proposal. This could be due to conflict of interest, or some other reason. (Nice to have feature: allow them to attach a note to explain why they marked certain SAB members as "not applicable"). There will be further discussion of the "applicability" of reviewers in the Proposal Reviews section, #...
10.6. Part of the Proposal Submission form will be preferred location for the event to take place, should the proposal be accepted after the review process. BIRS currently has 3, possibly 4 locations. The available locations should be configurable by Staff.
10.7. Another part of the Proposal Submission form will be preferred and impossible dates of the event, should the proposal be accepted. The selection of dates available to choose from is a function of the preferred location. Each location has different weeks of the year available for hosting events. The available weeks in each location also needs to be configurable by staff. i.e., Banff location has weeks 1-48, but Oaxaca location has weeks 20-24, 28-32, etc.. The Organizers will be able to select up to 5 preferred dates and 2 impossible dates -- these will act as constraint parameters to the schedule optimization program that will be run at the end of the review process.
#1. Proposal reviewers should be presented with a list of submitted proposals that they can review, named their "Work List". Some committee members can see all proposals, and others only the proposals assigned to them. Some may be in a group that allows viewing all proposals, and also have assigned proposals. The assigned proposals should be highlighted in the list of proposals, in some way.
14.5. Proposal reviewers should be able to indicate whether they give consent to sharing their review with the organizer. Staff or Scientific Advisory Board (a Committee) members may want to share a particular review with a proposal submitter, and this field gives them permission from the Reviewer to do that.
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A button for Staff or certain Committee members that would share a particular review with the Contact Organizer of a Proposal.
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The review form should allow uploads of files (e.g. PDFs), to be associated with the review.
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An option for Proposal Reviewers to receive e-mail (or other types) of notifications when their "Work List" changes. i.e. they've been assigned new proposals.
12.5. One committee, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), should have permission to assign proposals to particular Proposal Reviewers (Staff also have this ability). The relationship between a particular reviewer and the proposal they are assigned should have at least two additional properties:
a) The type of reviewer: One particular reviewer will be marked as a "Handling Editor", who is in charge of the reviews for this proposal.
b) Each Proposal Reviewer's relationship to their assigned proposal should have an "Objectivity" grade, of say, 1-5.
The system should automatically subtract from a Reviewer's objectivity score if, for example, the Reviewer's university affiliation is the same as the university affiliation of the Organizer who submitted the proposal. Or if the Reviewer is on the list of Potential Participants in the Proposal. There will be a list of conditions that affect a Reviewer's objectivity score. Members of the SAB committee should also be able to adjust the objectivity score of Reviewers, as they relate to particular proposals. The SAB members may have special knowledge of conflicts of interest, for example. The Objectivity Score might be called "Arms Length" score -- check with Director.
In the interface, the objectivity score of a reviewer assigned to a proposal should be colour-coded. For example, green for an objectivity score of 5, and red for a score of 1.
