Current Officers Present: Brad Balfour, Curtis Bradley, Lewis Grey, Mark Gerhardt, Hal Hart, Rudolf Landwehr, Charlene Hayden
ACM HQ Staff Present: none
Others: Garth Glynn, Harry Joiner, Peter Obermeyer, David Emery, Jim Moore, Rod Abraham, Bob Mathis, Elisa Van Damm, Terry Doran, Steve Grimaldi, Currie Colket, David Brookman, Ben Brosgol, Jorge Diaz-Herrera, Ed Colbert, Chad Brennon
Review and Approval of Agenda
Discussion on SIG Discretionary Fund, Membership Recruiting, Local Activities Board report on WAdaS were the actions added to New Business by Hal Hart.
Changes were moved & approved
Chair's Report
ACM has 80,000 members. That is near it's peak. But SIGs/member is down from peak of 4 to 1.1. Our membership decline is therefore average. Our financial situation is better than average for our size. We lost $60-70K last year. Because of downsizing of Tri-Ada '94, our minimum required fund balance went down. We are therefore $85K over minimum fund balance.
Hal believes that our cuts last year have hurt the working groups. He asked for questions on SIGAda status. Steve Grimaldi asked membership #'s. We are at around 1800 members. We mail about 2500 copies of Ada Letters.
Treasurer's Report
Member dues vs. Newsletter costs roughly broke even. Tri-Ada vs. Tax roughly broke even. $30K misc. income. $100K misc. expenses. (Travel $32K, Admin $9K, Initiatives $64K, $6K uncollected receivables). Bottom line is we lost $70K.
Membership is down. Therefore our income is down. Ben Brosgol asked about advertising and it was pointed out the Lewis Grey was working on that.
AI: Curtis will check on whether ACM is printing too many copies of Ada Letters.
Working groups have spent $0 based on the data. We know that there are expenditures that have been realized but haven't been booked. (CAUWG $1,196 vs $1,200 budget). $1,200 awards, $7K Ada UK, $1,200 officers meeting in NY. Best knowledge is that we budgeted $12,000 and spent $10,000.
Debate ensued over the amount actually spent vs. Reported to date and the process.
Status on action item of outstanding CD-ROM inquiry. Still not fully resolved, but some being worked on. $600-$800 being collected.
Tri-Ada 96 Status
Terry Doran cautioned that all numbers are cast in Jell-O.
Steve Grimaldi: registration as of early Tuesday were slightly under 500. Income is down significantly in all categories. Expenses are down a similar amount in all categories. Credit goes do D&OK who saved us significant amounts on hotel, etc. Budgeted surplus was $50K and $35K contingency. He expects to come close to $50K actual surplus. He doesn't expect any major surprises. Exhibits were a big hit (consolidations, etc.) Attendance is down. Tutorial attendance may be up. Key was that the group was frugal on advertising and other categories.
Don't underestimate D&OK ability to save us money. Also, we budgeted $650K for TA 95 expenses and so the ACM tax will likely be down.
Debate ensued over the reporting of numbers of registrants and the ability and accuracy of the collection.
AI: Curtis to get formula for ACM tax to Steve Grimaldi and executive committee.
FY96 Budget/Allocation Decision
Explanation of action item for us. Hal wants to spend 100% of the budget. Rudolph Landwher and Dave Emery objected.
Rudolf moved that 80% of the budget be allowed on all budget lines except Tri-Ada.
The proposal gets us close to eliminating the budget deficit (without accounting for a precise drop in Ada Letters expenditures). This may result in a balanced actuals.
Motion passed 5-0-1.
Working Groups Status/Review
SIGAda's summer meeting will be in cooperation with Ada Europe. Expectation is that some working groups may go and both work and present at that meeting.
ABWG - no status
ARTEWG - disbanded by request of its chair.
AIWG - spent $0. Mailing list of 70 new people on a total at 200. Only 2 are active. Workshop from last summer had 12 people attending. Distributed 300 copies of proceedings paid for by Mitre and SEI. Plan to do something with Ada Europe. Plan to be very active on updating their web page. 12 people showed up at the workshop on Monday at TA 95. Want to get an active membership. Plan for revitalizing members focusing on the use of the Web. Goal is then to get a small core group to produce a standard set of components.
ASISWG - joint meeting with ASISRG in San Diego. Put forth ASIS 2.0 (Ada 95) first public release. ASIS 2.0e document distributed on diskette along with two different tutorials on ASIS for Ada 83. Also there is a report on the progress of the Russian project. Currie also passed out the ASIS FAQ. So far, the group has been very active without spending SIGAda money. All participants are participating on their own nickel. Currie presented a new recommendation of its charter based on the technical changes of Ada 95 since there is no longer a concept of an Ada Library but rather a lighter-weight Ada Environment. The working group has approved the changes. Currie will send a copy to the sigada-elected mailing list.
Mark G. moved to accept the charter with the correction of a typo. Motion passed unanimously.
Next meeting is 11-12 March and 10 June in Switzerland. Would like to have a session at Ada Europe. 40-50 people stopped by on Monday night to pick up disks at the ASISWG meeting.
CAUWG - Went to WG4 in August. WG4 met in San Francisco at Object World. Many delegates went there and were impressed at what $10 bought on a CD-rom. Ben gave a 1 hour briefing on Ada 95's information systems effort. It appears that they will be adopting Ada 95's extensions in the next COBOL standard. Ben has written an article for Ada Letters on this. He also gave a presentation this afternoon on edited output. He'll also do a session at Ada Europe. CAUWG has been schizophrenic and worked on both technical and publicity. In the future CAUWG will focus on technical. Others will do the publicity (including EDWG). While there is a membership list, Ben is really the only active member.
EdWG - no report
EnvWG - Hal has spoken with Clyde. Clyde wanted to decommission the group a year a go, but was discouraged from it. However, now it is recognized that there is no current interest. ASISWG has taken on some of the similar activities.
Motion to disband EnvWG by Hal. 2nded by Charlene. Unanimous passage.
NumWG - no presence. Two of their packages have been accepted. Two others are in progress. The group will likely go out of business in the next year.
OOWG - Hasn't done a lot of work in the last year. Recently been asked to provide input ASISWG and PDL effort. Wants to keep the group going and reassess next year. Discussion on whether the group might be folded into a larger development working group.
PIWG - no presence.
ReuseWG - met last night. RAAT subgroup has been active and meeting for last four years and working closely with DoD's MIWG. The hold joint meetings bi-monthly. The group has had significant influence on policy and actions. Approximately 30 people attend on a regular basis. Also working with a CODSIA/CASE advisory group. One other subgroup deals with reuse life-cycle framework. This group has been less successful and is now on hold pending revitalization. There is not enough volunteer efforts to get the work done between meetings. Group has not spent any money that was requested, but didn't expect to and this has had no significant impact on their efforts. Distributed reuse CD-ROM at last years' STC containing many products. The introduction of DISA's Reuse IC has caused them to transfer many outreach activities to them. Group has worked on a revised charter. There are some minor changes. One is the replacement of the newsletter with a list server. Other change is to hold election of chair of ReuseWG in odd years.
Motion to accept ReuseWG charter passed unanimously.
Group met yesterday. One item of future interest is participation in new effort by others on design patterns, architecture and class libraries. With regard to having a workshop at summer meetings: no one from the group would be able to attend a meeting there. The will have their summer meeting at a different time and hold it in the US. Roy Bell will work on the ReuseWG web page. Discussion was held on using a service to distribute paper copy. Also use electronic copy. Some of what the group does is to place copies in the hands of those who need it not necessarily those who request it.
SSWG - no presence
SDSAWG - Ralph Nader model. Investigate where standards are in conflict with Ada and find work arounds. When they are up for revision, then help fix them. Two to three main working people. Since budget cutoff at WAdaS 94, there were no mailings. Lewis had no confidence that there were be funds. Ben Brosgol questioned the use of e-mail. Lewis pointed out that many of the people providing input to the group might not have it. The request was made that Lewis check on how many now have e-mail. Garth brought up the fact that there many people might benefit from Web page info. Lewis has suggested that this will be one of his actions in the future.
STDWG - not present
AI: Charlene to get with all not present working groups and send that to SIGAda extended
AI: Charlene to summarize the working groups presence in Switzerland.
Mark suggested that the working groups who could not go to Switzerland go to STC and hold meetings
Ada Letters Status
Page limit has been now set at 72. Except for one issue we've met that. New Dr. Ada 95 column has debuted. When KM George and Phil Brashear took over there were not very many articles in the pipeline, but now there are. He would like to see feature articles be preeminent authors in the field. He would like to consider including product announcements in the newsletter.
AI: Lewis to contact all international people to verify contact info.
Mark moved that we change Membership Plus package to include Ada Europe proceedings and Ada Yearbook as a second extra option in addition to Tri-Ada proceedings and then go to ACM for approval on this item. Brad seconded. Motion passed 6-0-1.
Hal suggests that the cost increase may limit memberships.
AI: Curtis to contact Paul Rivera for guidance on filling this action.
Ada Europe 96 Review of Status
SIGAda will go in-cooperation with Ada Europe for summer of 96. Three officers will go as a trade, as usual. In addition, Tri-Ada will pay for three Ada Europe officers. Mark and Charlene were appointed to their program committee. Next year will be June 10-14 in Montreaux. Cost SF700 early and SF800 late. Tutorial is SF400. In addition to the officers, registration will be waived for four participants from SIGAda and vice-versa for Ada Europe. It is hoped that this will stimulate participation.
AI: Charlene has action to determine how SIGAda will nominate attendees for this.
SIGAda Booth Report
There are three meetings: Object World Boston, May 20, 1996, Object World San Francisco in August 19 1996, and ACM Computing Week February 14-21, 1996 in Philadelphia. Other possibilities are Object Expo in early June in New York and STC. Consensus was to not to STC.
AI: Ed to present a plan to the committee to reflect the proposed set plus options.
Tri-Ada 96 Review
Jim Moore is perspective chair for Tri-Ada 96. He wants to turn a declining conference into a financial and spiritual success. Total attendance is on a trend line to decrease by 200 per year. The preliminary numbers for this year fall directly on that line, despite the attractive venue and higher walk in rate of S. California. There is no data to assume the trend line is better. Next year, then we ought to plan on 300 people. Moving from 1400 to 300 means a fundamentally different conference. In anticipation of that he's spent time thinking about this concept. To assist in this, in July he asked SIGAda executive committee to rank objectives and make trade-offs among goals. As of yesterday that had not been done. Therefore, the planning was done in ignorance of what those goals might be. There is a set of trade-offs in designing the conference in multiple dimensions. Hope to come up with a set that satisfies the (as yet unknown) objectives. So, he did that and came up with a proposal. Seven dimensions of trade-off:
Proposal is to pair with ICCCS (2nd conference is in Montreal) in the week of 10/24/95. The first one, this week is approximately 140 people.
In third week of October, conduct conference in parallel with ICCCS. At the end, IEEE Standards Forum would be held.
Questions and discussions were held on the proposal topic
Rod Abraham (next years conference management coordinator) presented the following options: Houston (10/24/95), Philadelphia (12/1/96), Atlanta (10/22/95), Cincinnati (11/7/95), Detroit (10/17/95), Orlando (bad date in late December).
Questions and discussions were held on all alternatives. The debate ran strong for several hours.
Motion was made to accept Jim's proposal. Motion Failed 2-4-1. Motion made to accept a US venue and passed 6-0-1.
Motion to Adjourn was made and passed at 12:54pm
NOTE: Subsequent to this meeting, another meeting was held.
The decision was made to hold Tri-Ada in Philadelphia on December
2-7, 1996. Jorge Díaz-Herrera accepted the position as
conference chair.