This message has been cross posted to the following Discussions: INFORMS Open Forum and MSOM Society .
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Dear Colleagues,
This is a call for proposals to host the MSOM Conference in 2017. (In June 2015, the conference will be held at the University of Toronto. In June 2016, it will be held at University of Auckland in New Zealand). By tradition, the 2017 conference should be held in North America. Please send completed proposals to galraz@virginia.edu before June 5th, 2015. All proposals will be evaluated by the MSOM board. Note that based on the survey of members we ran this past year, in addition to the traditional format of a single-host conference held on campus, we are also open to the possibility of a jointly organized conference where two or more schools in the same location can organize the conference in a hotel.
A proposal to host the 2017 Conference should address the following:
1. The Society Bylaws (as amended) require that a proposal to host the conference must name a conference chair (or one of the conference co-chairs) to serve as the primary contact between conference organizers and the Society officers.
a) Who will be the conference chair or co-chair?
b) Who else will be involved in organizing the conference?
2. Attendance at recent conferences has been on the order of 400 to 500 registered participants. Please provide information showing that your proposal has the ability to handle a group of this size. In particular, please address the following questions:
a) How many local hotel rooms are available? How far from the conference site are the main accommodation options located?
b) How many tracks would your school be able to accommodate? (Assume that a room must be able to hold comfortably 60 people at a minimum in order to host a track.) Based on the past and the survey we ran, it seems that a majority would like to keep between 10 and 12 tracks and thus the goal would be to aim for that number.
c) Where would the conference rooms be located, i.e., would some conference tracks be located in different buildings and, if so, how far would they be from each other?
3. The Society is required to have a business meeting at the conference. This has usually been held over lunch on the first day of the conference. Is there a large auditorium available for the meeting?
4. Some of the past MSOM conferences lost a significant amount of money (on the order of $15,000 to $20,000). This deficit was covered by the host institution. The current MSOM officers feel it is important that, as the size of the conference grows, it should be run on at least a break even basis.
a) Please provide a rough budget for the conference. Factors to consider are any facility charges; catering charges (for lunch and coffee breaks); staff charges (do support staff need to bill all of their time to a specific account?); transportation charges (either from the hotel to the conference or to any social event); any social events.
b) What do you anticipate charging for the conference in order to break even? Note that historically, anywhere between 30 to 45% of attendees are students and thus charged significantly less (traditionally 1/3 the regular registration fee). Also assume attendees for Special Interest Group conferences are charged roughly the relevant catering costs. In the past few years the charges were $450 for regular members ($400 for early registration) and $150 for regular student members ($100 for early registration).
c) Indicate if your institution will be able to contribute sponsorship money to the conference, and if so, how much.
5. What social events would be possible?
6. Listed below are some additional guidelines for MSOM conferences. Would you plan on following these guidelines?
a) The conference shall be held no earlier than the second week of June and no later than the third week of July. Any deviation from this timing must be approved by a majority of Society officers. In addition, we may need to coordinate with INFORMS to avoid potential conflicts with other major Conferences (e.g., INFORMS International Conference).
b) The one-day Special Interest Group workshops will take place immediately preceding the MSOM conference. The MSOM conference organizers are responsible for providing each SIG with adequate facilities, as well as for the arrangement of food for each SIG. The MSOM conference organizers will work with each SIG chair so as to synchronize the conference and workshops registration and submission deadlines.
c) The abstract submission process with blind review will be used to accept papers into the contributed sessions. Each abstract should consist of (no more than) a 3-page description of the work to be present. The abstract should include a brief description of the research problem, the key methodology and assumptions used, and a summary of major results and their significance, but should not include any math or Greek symbols.
d) There should be a poster session that is held in conjunction with a schedule break in the conference - no other sessions should take place at this time. All papers submitted to the MSOM conference by the stated due date are immediately accepted into the poster session. It is up to the conference organizers if a paper accepted/invited into one of the regular tracks will be withdrawn from the poster session, or if a paper can be presented in both mediums.
e) The conference organizers have within their discretion the ability to include invited papers within the conference. The total number of invited papers should not exceed the equivalent of 1/3 of the total paper presentations. The purpose of the invited tracks is to help promote “cutting edge” research as well as encourage the participation of select individual whom the conference organizers deem beneficial to the overall quality of the conference.
f) All presentations within the Invited and Contributed sessions are to be allocated 30 minutes each.
7. Please provide any other information which you feel would be relevant to the board when evaluating the attractiveness of your proposal to host the MSOM conference.
Best regards,
Gal Raz
MSOM VP of Meetings
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Gal Raz
Associate Professor Business
University of Virginia
Charlottesville VA
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