ACA Meeting Minutes
Below will be posted the minutes from Spring, Summer and Fall Council meetings, from meetings between Council and each SIG, and also from the all-members' Business Meeting which is conducted during each Annul Meeting.
Minutes from Council Meetings with each SIG
Minutes from the All-Members' Business Meetings
Spring 2010 Meeting minutes - coming soon.
Council Meetings with each SIG
Summer 2009 Meetings minutes - coming soon.
All Members Business Meeting Minutes
2009 Business Meeting in Toronto
July 29th 2009
Approval of Minutes from ACA 2008 All Member Business Meeting
Accepted. (Pinkerson/Hackert)
President's Report (Von Dreele)
Membership dues: Von Dreele announced that 2010 membership dues essentially remain unchanged (regular $100), although some had been rounded up to easier numbers: Postdoc/retirees from $39 to $40 and students from $24 to $25. Postdocs who moved into a tenure-track position or industry could remain at the postdoc rate until 10 years after award of their PhD (increase from 5 years).
Fellows Program: The ACA would electronically ballot the membership on the possible introduction of a Fellows Program, which would be in-line with other societies, such as the American Chemical Society. It would not be just for prize winners, but also for service, education and political contributions. Whether an ACA Fellows Program should be created would be put to the membership as an item on the upcoming election ballot. Prior to that information on how a Fellows Program would be implemented would be included in RefleXions to elicit comments from members. For full details see 2009 Summer Council Meeting Minutes, page 5.
Awards: The 2010 Etter Early Career Award winner had been selected (Raymond C. Trievel, Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan), but the Fankuchen, Trueblood & Wood awards had still to be decided.
ACA website: This will change between now and the end of year. Updates to the web-site would be made by ACA office staff rather than by a third party as currently. This would enable control over the web-site, and lead to faster posting of material.
ACA Annual Meetings: 2010: Abstracts will be due the end of March 2010. The planning meeting is on Friday. Members were reminded that SIGs determine the content of the meeting, and thus it was very important to join a SIG. 2013: Negotiations are in progress to make the 2013 Annual Meeting joint with the Denver Diffraction Conference (DXC), to be held in Denver, 1st week in August. 2014: This will be a Spring meeting, either in the Southwest or West, because of the August 2014 IUCr Congress in Montreal.
Treasurer's Report (Santarsiero)
Attendance at the meeting was just over 900 (4th largest meeting), and there were more abstracts than ever.
Poster sessions at the 2009 meeting: There had been problems with the poster sessions, partially due to the high number of abstracts. For each poster there was a single session, where the presenter had to remain by their poster the entire time. This meant the presenters were unable to look at other posters in their session. Many presenters only put the poster up at the start of the session, and they had to be removed immediately following the session.
Suggestions included the following; (1) For the posters to remain up the entire meeting. Although this was the ideal, it was probably impractical due to the high numbers of posters. (2) That all posters for that day's session be put up by 10am (i.e first coffee break). This would enable presenters, judges for poster prizes and attendees ample time to look at the posters for that day. (3) That posters were up for 2 days, and each day half the presenters will man their posters. This would give the presenters time to look at posters on the day they were not presenting.
Many posters that should have been up on the first day were absent. By the second day there were many more. Cora Lind suggested that posters should be grouped by interests. There had also been issues with too little space in the corridors between posters. Placing the winning posters on boards by the session rooms was a great idea and should be continued.
Hotel rates: Members felt the hotel rate was too high. However, it was pointed out that the location of lower rate hotels led to higher transport costs. There was a discussion of WiFi costs, which are extremely high wherever you go (see article on page 5 of Summer 2009 RefleXions). As such the ACA had decided this year to limit the number of WiFi connections it paid for. The members felt the ACA should have made clear where WiFi was free (exhibit hall and hotel lobby). The connections required usernames and passwords, which were available at the registration desk, but very few people knew this. Cora Lind asked if usernames and passwords could be placed on name badges. This was not an option as the badges had to be made prior to knowing the usernames and passwords. It turned out that WiFi did work in the lecture rooms (the ACA were under the impression that this was not the case). A cluster of 4 computers were available to ACA registrants, but required a hotel room login. The rate for daily internet access in the hotel rooms was thought too high by members. Although Queen Tower was fine for WiFi, Richmond Tower was bad for maintaining WiFi connections. Gerd Rosenbaum wondered if free internet could be negotiated into the hotel rate. As most hotels now offer free internet access, the ACA should try and hold the Annual Meeting at a hotel that offered this. Peter Mueller stated that hotel rates should be renegotiated within the long term contract.
Abstracts: Caroll Johnson introduced the topic of abstracts, which were only offered on CD this year, and therefore meant everyone had to bring laptops to access them. It was suggested that several hardcopy abstract books be available at the registration desks for those who did not have a laptop. It was pointed out that abstracts could be looked at on the web prior to the meeting, allowing registrants to make choices prior to arrival. It was noted that many abstracts are held back from the web by presenters. Could these be released on the web a week or two before the meeting? This was thought a good idea, and would be incorporated into the abstract submission information for next years Meeting.
Increasing opportunity for registrants to mix: Should the opening reception be held somewhere other than the vendor hall to encourage better mixing? This would be too expensive. Colquhoun pointed out that the vendors pay for the drinks and food at the opening reception, so it was appropriate that this take place in the vendor hall. Should coffee be in the vendor hall? Cora Lind liked having coffee breaks in the vendor hall because the breaks were short and it enabled interaction with the vendors. How about a half day off for socialization? Hackett suggested that there should be tables and chairs in coffee area for people to sit down. It was noted that at any one time only about 1/3rd of registrants are in sessions, so 2/3rds must be doing something else. Francis Bernstein pointed out that having lunch concessions available would be good for keeping registrants together and therefore mixing. The IUCr managed to have cheap lunchtime concession stands, why could the ACA not do the same? It was noted that quite a number of registrants were taking the lunchtime opportunity to watch the free science movies offered this year. This reduced mixing too.
Marcia Colquhoun was complimented by the members on the double-sided name tags made for this meeting. It meant the names were always in sight.
Vice President's Report (Judy Kelly)
Upcoming Annual Meetings Information
2011 (New Orleans): The Program Chair will be Chris Cahill. The awards to be given at this meeting will be the Patterson Award and the Etter Early Career Award. For the Patterson Award there will be a call for nominations in the Fall of 2009, with the closing date for nomination submission being May 1st 2010. For the Etter Early Career Award, the closing date for applications was May 1st 2010.
2013 (Denver): The Annual Meeting will be joint with the Denver Diffraction Conference (DXC). The DXC is held the 1st week in August, and the ACA will move to that date for 2013.
2014 (West Coast or Southwest): This is an IUCr year, and the Congress is being held in Montreal, Canada. Therefore, the ACA will have a spring Annual Meeting.
New Business
Governance of IUCr: Currently there is no US member on the IUCr governing committee. It was pointed out that Louis Delbaere served on the committee. Although not officially there as a US representative, he did actively support US interests, and reported back to the ACA Council. The new President of the IUCr, Sine Larsen has been very accommodating and feels the ACA and USNCCr are underrepresented in the IUCr governance. She is thinking of changing the by-laws to dictate composition of Executive Committee. Currently 3 Asia, 1 ACA & 6 Europeans. World-wide 50% of crystallographers are members of the ACA.
Improving the Annual Meeting: Gerd Rosenbaum wanted talks to have the same set times across sessions, and that Chairs keep speakers to time. It had been very difficult to move between sessions due to different time slots and speakers not being held to time. If the speakers will not stop, the projector should be covered and no after talk questions allowed. Many scientific meetings rigorously enforce the amount of time speakers are given. The Toronto organizers had tried to synch coffee breaks, but with varying mixes of invited speakers and those chosen from abstracts, set numbers of speakers and length of talks within the sessions was difficult to do, and therefore left to the discretion of the Chairs.
There was a discussion regarding the content of posters at the ACA Meeting. As the ACA is the professional society for crystallography in the Americas, it should insist that crystallographic data be on all posters, not just the final structures (championed by Caroll Johnson and Francis and Herb Bernstein). Kelly felt that some posters that did not have crystallography on them were appropriate, such as the development of a difficult protein expression system. She also suggested that the Pauling Poster Prizes should explicitly state that substantive crystallographic data and its handling would be a criteria used in the judging process. It was agreed that this change should be implemented at the Chicago 2010 Annual Meeting. Peter Mueller felt the affiliations of speakers should be in the program book.
