EVOLANG Business Meeting Minutes
Kyoto, Japan
16-3-2012
Erica Cartmill serving as secretary
Jim Hurford opened the meeting by raising the question of how much organization the group needed to having moving forward and thinking about a (far-distant) future without the leadership of Jim and others.
There were approximately 40 people in attendance.
The following are a list of topics raised and votes taken on a wide range of issues, from the structure of the organization to specifics of the conferences and review process. When a vote was taken, the outcome is noted. Voting was by simple majority and several votes were close.
The decisions made by those in attendance are meant to serve as feedback of those who attended the Kyoto meeting and as guidelines for the next conference. The central committee has review the proposed guidelines and determined that they support making them the general guidelines of the organization for future conferences.
RESOLUTIONS
1. (Vote) A permanent website will be established. The address will be and Luke McCrohon will serve as webmaster for the foreseeable future.
2. We will establish (and make public) a procedure for dealing with competing bids for future EVOLANG sites. As of the meeting, we had 3 potential sites (Grenoble, New Orleans, and Lund) but no means for formally proposing or weighing bids. The central committee needs to decide on these procedures and post the guidelines on the new website.
3. (Vote) Each conference should forward some money from the profit to the next conference. Kenny Smith is the official treasurer and has an account set up for this purpose.
4. (Vote) Invited speakers should not be part of the main conference (but may be part of the workshops). There was a lot of discussion about the inclusion of invited speakers. Pros: can fill out or introduce areas of research, Cons: should be a meritocracy, didn’t raise the standard of presented work, reflects poorly on us as a community to have non-peer-reviewed work, problems scheduling invited talks opposite submitted talks. Compromised by proposing that invited speakers be used in workshops to round out areas, etc. but not in main conference.
5. (Vote) Limit the number of plenary speakers to 7 (plus or minus 1). There was a general consensus that the number of plenaries at Kyoto (11) was too high. Some people wanted to limit the number more severely to only 2 or 3; others wanted a more modest reduction. The group agreed that, at minimum, a reduction to the level of years past was necessary.
6. Posters should be given a dedicated time slot not concurrent to talks (preferably with wine). All agreed that the Kyoto poster sessions were successful.
7. (Vote) Talk slots should be 30 minutes (20 min with 10 min for questions). There was a lot of debate about the merits of 20 vs. 30 minute slots. Most agreed that the 20 minute slots at Kyoto did not leave enough time for substantial discussion and that this was lacking from the conference this year.
8. (Vote) Sessions should be chaired. The sessions at Kyoto were not chaired and some felt this decreased the coherence, smoothness, and level of discussion in the sessions.
9. (Vote) Conferences should try to include a roundtable with some speakers. This was a missed feature and most felt that there was a lack of general discussion in Kyoto.
10. 90 minutes is a good length for the poster session(s). If they are much shorter there isn’t enough time to see everything. But if they are much longer, the presenters become exhausted.
11. Should there be more explicit guidelines (to the authors or reviewers) for what constitutes relevance to the evolution of language? This issue was tabled due to time constraints, but the central committee should reopen the discussion. Suggestions were made to post keywords or past topics on the website to help guide submissions, but objects were made that this too severely limits the potential field. Jim pointed out that this is a reoccurring but small problem.
12. (Vote) Reviews should be double-blind in the future. There were advocates of both single and double-blind reviews, but the majority agreed that name recognition and reputation were being used too heavily (for good or bad) in guiding reviews.
13. (Vote) Junior members may be nominated and elected to the central committee at business meetings. They will be on a 2 year trial and may be approved to the permanent committee at the subsequent meeting. This may lead to an ever increasing central committee, so the committee should make some decisions before the next meeting about when and how to limit the size of the central committee.
14. (Vote) Luke McCrohon and Erica Cartmill are approved as members of the permanent committee. Heidi Lyn is approved as a new junior member.
15. There will be a list of conference attendees (names only) posted on the general website. Participants will be emailed with the option to opt out before the list is posted.
16. How long should submitted abstracts/papers be? There are some potential problems with the 2- vs. 8-page format currently used. 8-page papers get systematically lower reviews. Proposal made to move to a single 4-page format, but concerns raised about psychology journal guidelines about what constitutes previously published work and the fact that a 4-page abstract published in a proceedings might make it difficult to publish the work elsewhere subsequently. Discussion was cut short due to time constraints but the central committee should revisit this issue before the next round of submissions.