2013Q1 Reports: Info Officer

Preface: As the inaugural Information Officer (IO) executive member at-large, it is not yet clear what the scope of my duties are. As such, I will attempt to define them, while reporting and planning in this document. This is written without prior knowledge of the ACL Exec's structure, so please forgive me if I overstep my bounds as to my presumed responsibilities.

Presumed duties

As relayed by Drago and Jian, I understand that the IO's duties are to look after the integration of the different ACL-wide (exclusive of SIGs) activities that are related to information dissemination. These include the Anthology, journals, website, and archive. Each of these individual information services are served by a different coordinator, so an understanding of the individual components and being able to help with coordination and delegation to address issues.

Currently, I'm largely unaware of the pressing points with respect to information services, so I hope the teleconference will help bring out a list of points that individual Exec member have noted that are problematic about the information services. I hope to address some of these easier points within the next 2-3 months and them turn attention to 1) harder problems on the list and 2) forward planning to address longer-term information services.

Website

The website duties are governed by our webmaster, which looks after aclweb.org, domain registration (on behalf of the business office), electronic mailing lists, Wiki, ExecWiki and AdminWiki.

Webmaster

A current difficulty is that our former webmaster (for aclweb.org) has resigned. Ali Hakim (through Drago) has been working as Webmaster for over 5 years and resigned for personal reasons. Let us extend our sincere thanks to him on the record for fixing and updating the website with minimal delays.

We are currently sourcing for a new webmaster through Drago's solicitations and so far only one member (Baoli Li from China) has shown interest. I'm currently assessing him. An important responsibility of the webmaster is to reply and act in a timely manner. If you have suggestions or would like to nominate someone, please let me know, as personal connections usually work better than open calls for help. This is a paid position (as I understand it is 20 USD per hour).

Wikis

Our Wiki system is running a very old version of MediaWiki (same software which is used to run Wikipedia). It is stable but very outdated.

Domains

This is our main website, under two separate domains. Note that this is separate from our web hosting; this just secures our right to point aclweb.org to a particular IP address. Domain registration and renewal for five domains (3 used so far) is part of our hosting contract. This means that the domain renewal is done by the webhost in a just-in-time manner.

Domain ID:D3240355-LROR
Domain Name:ACLWEB.ORG
Created On:24-Mar-1997 05:00:00 UTC
Last Updated On:26-Mar-2012 01:22:37 UTC
Expiration Date:25-Mar-2013 05:00:00 UTC

Domain ID:D104923136-LROR
Domain Name:ASSOCIATIONFORCOMPUTATIONALLINGUISTICS.ORG
Created On:23-Sep-2004 17:42:23 UTC
Last Updated On:24-Sep-2012 01:31:23 UTC
Expiration Date:23-Sep-2013 17:42:23 UTC

This are other domains that we hold for reasons unknown to me. Apparently redirects to the main website. No reason to let it go until we need to register a new name.

Domain ID:D104923137-LROR
Domain Name:ACL2005.ORG
Created On:23-Sep-2004 17:42:24 UTC
Last Updated On:24-Sep-2012 01:31:26 UTC
Expiration Date:23-Sep-2013 17:42:24 UTC

This is the domain that the ACL Anthology will be migrating to over the next few years. This was registered separately by Min. As our webhost is a bit underpowered with respect to programming capabilities, this points to a Amazon EC2 instance that is only used for the pilot Anthology beta currently (not charged).

Domain ID:D47707006-LRMS
Domain Name:ACLANTHOLOGY.INFO
Created On:06-Sep-2012 15:49:02 UTC
Last Updated On:05-Nov-2012 20:30:17 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Sep-2022 15:49:02 UTC

Plans and action items. None. This section for information only.

Web host

aclweb.org is hosted by 1and1.com. We are under a developer package that has 300 GB of space and 5 included domains and a quota of 100 MySQL databases (currently we use 12).

Action item. The credit card on file can no longer be accepted by 1and1. We need to change the card details before the next billing period (23 March 2013). I currently do not know the price for the package.

Assessment of webhost. My current feeling is that 1and1 is a satisfactory web host. It is certainly not very competitive with respect to features but it is stable and hasn't been affected much by outages at other cloud services (e.g., Amazon). I believe we are not spending a lot on web hosting so changing this for pricing reasons would be counterproductive, as there is a lot of software and data incorporated into the system. For other systems and pilot projects that require more features, we'll have to look elsewhere for hosting.

Plans. As noted in the assessment, we should not be changing our webhost. We do need to look after our disk quota as space will start to be a concern if we start hosting archival quality videos on our server.