[Air-L] Let's talk about AoIR

[Jennifer Stromer-Galley]

Wow! I go away for a long weekend (without access to email, hooray!), and come back to see the AoIR list has exploded with posts.

As one who objected to the change in the list many moons ago to shift to a reply-to-individual rather than a reply-to-list, and have seen the list go from one of lively discussion to one of posting announcements, I love to see the dialogue and debate happening here now. (Not that I am declaring causation, mind you, but it is food for thought.)

I just want to toss out a few thoughts. First, as others note, our conference organizers and reviewers are the worker bees of this organization, engaging in often thankless, challenging work. So, I just want to say thanks, thanks, thanks, for giving your time, insight, and care to this community of Internet scholars.

Second, there is no magically correct formula to conference submissions and reviews. There are better processes and worse processes. Each conference organization seems to do theirs a bit differently and for different reasons. The key is thinking for us what it is we want our IR conference to be. 

The shift that happened this year was, as I understand it, an effort to introduce a bit more regularity to the submissions to help reviewers to make sense of what they were evaluating and to help improve the overall quality of the ultimate presentations at the conference, by forcing a bit more depth and detail to the submission. 

I fully support these goals. We want the AoIR conference to present the best of shiny research and theorizing about the Internet, and we want a submission process that helps reviewers to shift the shiny bits from those that are dull (or half-baked to mix metaphors). 

I also want AoIR to remain interdisciplinary. For me, that is our strength -- and paradoxically it also seems to be the crux of the problem we are experiencing currently.

So, I second suggestions to better tune the process introduced this year: a) give reviewers more information and guidelines to help them judge what they are reviewing in terms of the type of submission; b) suggest a template that people can follow and invite creativity and flexibility for submissions; c) establish a committee to help oversee and provide guidance for reviewers; d) try to cultivate a larger bank of reviewers.

I think it would be helpful, if logistics allow, for reviewers to see what other reviewers wrote. Because many of our reviewers are junior scholars, turning the review process into a teaching one by sharing with the reviewers what each wrote can help improve the reviewing process in future conferences. 

And, count me in as someone who is willing to help in thinking about this in some sort of organized way.

~Jenny