CIES Conference 2010

Three important changes will affect this year’s submission process to the CIES Annual Conference: (1) membership requirement to submit presentation proposals; (2) Transition to a fully functioning on-line submission system (via the company called All Academic); (3) new guidelines for proposals.
 

1. Membership requirement to submit presentation proposals

Since 2006, CIES has required that a presenter at the Annual Meeting must be a member of the Society. We have found that it is necessary to take the final step in the implementation of this policy which is, as other professional organizations require, to ask for membership ID in order to submit a proposal. This is being implemented for the CIES 2010 conference. If the submission is jointly-authored, the lead author must be a member of the CIES. This makes it possible that once accepted, the sessions will not be taken out of the program because the presenter or presenters are not CIES members.
 

2. Transition to the on-line submission system

In an attempt at managing the large number of proposals we receive every year, an on-line proposal submission system was introduced last year. This on-line system is expected to help conference organizers develop the conference program more efficiently and on time. In order to do this, the system prompts you for the information that we will then use to build the schedule of presentations and ultimately the conference program. Last year marked the introduction of the system but we did not use it to full capacity and thus much work was done manually. By requiring that membership identification be obtained before submitting a proposal (see # 1 above) and asking you to input all the information required to build the conference program, we hope to make the process of producing the program more efficient. As with the implementation of any new process, there will be “bugs” in the system. Thanks to your helpful feedback we have already corrected one problem with the number of words that the system was able to accept for abstracts, and we are asking All Academic to help save the pages as they are entered. Please let us know whether you encounter any problems when attempting to use the system. We are very thankful for your help!
 

3. Proposal guidelines & requirements

This change responds to the goal set by the CIES Board of Directors last year (2009) to increase the quality of the presentations as well as to increase diverse opportunities for CIES members to present their work and ideas. In the closing meeting of the board of directors I was asked to develop a more rigorous procedure for proposal submission. A number of people have complained that it was not possible to judge the quality of a prospective presentation with only a short abstract as we have done in the past. In addition to increasing the quality of papers we present, another goal was to introduce diversity in the format of presentations (such as posters, round tables, in addition to panels and papers) and to be more supportive of young scholars and graduate students attending the conference. This goal is being implemented for CIES 2010 in consultation with the conference program committee. We are aware that members wishing to submit may need to see examples of expected proposals. You can find these in the website following this link:  http://www.cies2010.msu.edu/example-proposals.html