2021Q1 Reports: Member at-large - IT
1. At this point, the standardization of ACL domains and conference websites is pretty much fully operational. ACL now controls and auto-renews even more chapter and SIG domains. This saves ACL money on domains and makes things more standardized.
2. The ACL organizational AWS account was used successfully for the ACL and EMNLP 2020 virtual conferences and is on track to be used for EACL 2021 as well. I have been working with the web chairs of all those websites and we now have a documented, standardized process on how to set up this infrastructure easily.
3. Our organization GitHub account is going strong with conference website repos, anthology, and paper reviewing repositories all co-located in one place. The new ACLRollingReviews repository was just created there.
4. I have setup (and made available on ACL's github) a script which can send bulk emails using Amazon SES (up to 50,000 emails a day). This was successfully used to send out survey emails to all ~3400 ACL 2020 email participants in about 20 minutes and to the full set of ~15000 ACL members for ACl 2021 reviewer recruitement in about an hour.
5. Our great volunteer team put together an alternative form using typeform.com for the ACL portal fellow nominations. A prototype was shown to previous Fellow Committee chairs. They provided some feedback which was incorporated and we are now waiting for a second round of feedback.
6. I plan to set up two repositories and corresponding public documentation websites (separate) from the ACL portal. These two websites will be for a conference handbook and for the IT handbook respectively. The repositories will use a static documentation framework like mkdocs.org and any pushes to the repositories will be auto-built and deployed to the websites. I chose this option because this allows us to bypass the portal (which is quite old) and make it very easy for people to contribute to this type of documentation. Ideally, this would live on the new website but since it's hard to switch to the new website without migrating the entire portal, this is a reasonable compromise. I hope to set up the new websites at domains like: handbooks.aclweb.org/conference and handbooks.aclweb.org/infotech.