Area Chair Meeting Phase

Description

This phase is for the days of the Area Chairs Meeting. The assumption is that the entire meeting is conducted electronically, i.e., area chairs come to the meeting with their laptops and use the system to view and enter recommendations.

Functionalities Offered During this Phase (by User Type)

Authors: Can view their submitted papers but cannot edit any of the paper information they have already submitted.
Reviewers: Reviewers can view their reviews but cannot edit them any longer or change their rankings.
Area Chairs: Can view the papers assigned to them and the available reviews EXCEPT for papers that were marked as conflict papers by the program chairs. Can view the workspace of all other area chairs and, hence, can access the pdfs, reviews and recommendations of every non-conflict paper submitted to the conference. Can fill out an area chair recommendation form with their accept/reject recommendation, can mark papers for discussion or recommend a paper for an award. Can enter or modify reviews for papers assigned to them and can view author-submitted responses to reviewer comments. Finally, area chairs can enter or modify reviews for papers to which they were assigned as reviewers by the program chairs.
Administrators: Can enter recommendations/decisions made by the whole group, categorizing papers into the categories 'Accept Oral', 'Oral/Poster Border', 'Accept Poster', 'Poster/Reject Border' and 'Reject'. Can access all papers and can create specialized views (e.g., orals, posters, boundary papers) that hide all author information and all conflict papers so that they can be shown to the entire group of area chairs (e.g., using a projector).

Preparations BEFORE Switching to the Meeting Phase

Make sure area chairs have entered their recommendations for all conflict papers, as they will not have access to those papers during this phase. Only the admins will have access to these papers during the meeting.

Switching to the Meeting Phase

Execute

cd /scratch/oct/aolserver/servers/oct/tcl ./set_phase_meeting

When the script is run as shown above, it will NOT actually switch OCT to that phase. Instead, it will display the steps that must be performed before the system goes into this phase.
Once you are convinced that everything is set up for switching to this phase, execute
```
./set_phase_meeting yes
```
to perform the switch.
Most interaction of the admin with the system during this phase will be by displaying the list of papers and entering acceptance decisions made during the meeting.

Actions During the Meeting Phase

All operations under the 'Area Chair Meeting Phase' are designed for showing to the whole group: they hide all identifying author information, they hide all area chair conflict papers, and they allow the admin to enter a decision for a paper.

Phase Indicator

The 'Current Phase Parameters' on the Administrator menu remain unchanged, i.e., they should be equal to (closed,submit)

To verify that the change occured, go to the 'Chairs' workspace, refresh the browser page, and check that the workspace allows an area chair to view the workspace of all other area chairs.