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Specification Updates, Jan 19, 2021

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Banff International Research Station edited this page Jan 20, 2021 · 9 revisions

Following a staff meeting today, the following changes and additions need to be applied to the Proposals specifications, and to the previous update.

Changes to Previous Changes

  1. All items under the Program Committees heading should moved to be under the Proposal Reviews heading.

Change to Original Spec

Under Staff and Director Features, General functionality needed by staff, #9 & #10 should be replaced by:

  1. An external e-mail API service such as Mailchimp's Transactional Emails feature (formerly Mandril), or possibly a similar solution offered by Mailgun (which we already use for Workshops), Mailjet, should be integrated into Proposals. Staff need a way to compose email templates for various types of messages that will be sent automatically from both Workshops and Proposals. For example, transactional emails such as invitation to do a review of a proposal, or inviting a scientist to be a reviewer. These services provide a good interface for that, and offer APIs for sending and receiving email from our app.

New Features

  1. Display a table with the following data: proposal code, title, organizer name, handling reviewer's name, a summary of the review statistics, and the committee member's rank for the proposal. Sortable and searchable. A print to PDF feature. An export to CSV feature. (For details inquire about "Chee's spreadsheet").

  2. A post-review process report, summarizing how many proposals were submitted, how many reviews were done, by how many reviewers, and compared with the same stats from previous years. (For details inquire about "Nassif's report").

  3. A feature to summarize data from past proposals, in reference to the current proposal. For example, when viewing a proposal, show a histogram of how many proposals that have the same subject codes have been submitted in the past. How many of those were accepted, and rejected? Arrange by year. (For details inquire about "Louigi's suggestion").

  4. A feature for a proposal's Handling Reviewer ("handling editor" in journal parlance) to request a change to the proposal, to be sent to the proposal's submitter (Organizer). Staff must approve the message before it is sent to the organizer, with the ability to edit the message (but keep the original note from the handling reviewer). The organizer gets the request, with a deadline for responding. The Handling Reviewer is notified when the organizer submits a revision to the proposal. The Handling Reviewer can indicate "accept", "reject", or "other" with respect to the update from the organizer, and has a textarea for leaving comments on the update.

  5. Every proposal should have attached to it the entire history of every message sent in relation to that proposal, every grade, every update, comments from everyone, etc, -- in an easily accessible interface. See the following screenshot from the EditFlow journal review system for an example. Contact Malabika for more details about Editflow-like features.

Editflow

  1. The last name of the person designated as the proposal's Handling Reviewer should be mentioned in the proposal list.

  2. A reporting feature to generate a PDF for each proposal that includes the proposal itself, all reviews of the proposal including grades and comments, and a summary of the "scores", as shown in #1. These reports are for Program Committee members who like to work on printed materials instead of online.

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