Important dates for working groups

Deadline for proposal19 January
Notification of WGs to proceed,
membership applications open
27 January
Membership applications close26 March
Notification of WGs to run;
distributed work begins in earnest
1 April
Intense face-to-face work15 – 16 June
Work continues during remainder of conference17 – 19 June
Draft report submission to chairs19 June
Distributed work continues from 20 June
Report submission for reviewTBA
Notification of accepted reportsTBA
Camera-ready submissionTBA

What is a working group?

An ITiCSE working group is an intense collaboration between five to ten researchers from around the world to produce a high-value report on a topic of interest in computing education.

A working group begins with a proposal by up to three leaders. The proposals are reviewed by the working group chairs, who decide which proposals can proceed to recruit members. The decision depends on the quality of the proposals, but also on the number of suitable rooms available for the work of the groups at the conference.

For about two months, the selected working groups recruit members through the WG pages on the conference website and by other means. Once applications close, the WG leaders select their group’s members from the list of applicants. There is then a short period of negotiation during which the WG chairs try to resolve any groups that are oversubscribed or undersubscribed.

The viable groups then begin their work, particularly their literature review and data gathering, and continue this work until the time of the conference.

Working groups meet for dinner on the Sunday preceding the conference, then gather for intense face-to-face work for the two days prior to the conference. This work continues during the conference, with some members leaving as necessary to present conference papers or chair sessions, and all members attending plenary conference sessions. On the final day of the conference, each group is required to submit a solid draft of its report to the working group chairs.

Work on the analysis and report continue immediately after the conference, even though some of the participants might prefer to be on summer holidays. This work culminates in the submission of the report for rigorous review.

Reports accepted following review are given a few weeks to respond to the reviewers’ suggestions, and are then submitted for publication in a supplement to the conference proceedings.

Formatting the proposal

The initial proposal for a working group is a two-page submission. The essential components of a working group submission are the title, the names and affiliations of up to three leaders, and an abstract of up to 250 words describing the group’s goal and its approach to achieving that goal. If a working group is accepted to proceed to the recruitment stage, these details will be displayed on this website to recruit interested members to the group. The submission is not anonymous: it must include the authors’ names and affiliations. The remainder of the two pages can be used to indicate the background of the WG proposers/leaders; for example, past experience in the Working Group topic area (projects, references, etc).

If a working group is accepted to run, a two-page extended abstract will be published in the conference proceedings. This will not be the same as the initial proposal. At the very least, it will include the names and affiliations of the other working group members besides the leaders. In addition, it will probably not include the material on the backgrounds of the leaders, but will instead expand on the subject matter.

If working group leaders have a strongly preferred title for their final report, they are advised to choose a somewhat different title for the extended abstract. If there are two publications with exactly the same title, author list, and year of publication, some authors might unintentionally cite the extended abstract rather than the full report.

The initial proposal, the extended abstract, and the final report are all required to follow ACM’s publication guidelines. For more detail, see Formatting requirements on the Call for Participation page.

Submitting a WG proposal

When your proposal is correctly formatted and ready for submission, convert it to Adobe PDF format.

Follow the instructions on Submission process at the foot of the Call for Participation page.

Questions

If you have questions about anything discussed above, please contact the WG chairs, iticse2020wg@easychair.org.

Sponsors

SIGCSE