Proxy Chair

Purpose

The role of the Proxy Chair in submissions to the United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) conference and Computing Education Practice (CEP) conference is to mitigate against real or perceived Conflicts of Interest (CoI) with the General Chair, Programme Chair or other senior organisers with a position of influence over conference proceedings.

Rationale

The rationale for the role is to manage the expectation of the wider community in dissemination of academic work via UKICER and CEP. The role is designed to ensure that an individual or individuals serving as chairs that have influence in what is included in the conference proceedings are not involved in the design-making associated with submissions that represent a CoI. The role is designed to be an ‘alternative decision maker’ and is inline with the ACM Conflict of Interest policy.

An alternative is to not permit the General Chair, Programme Chair or any other senior organisers the ability to submit artefacts for consideration to either conference. Given that the General Chair, Programme Chair and other senior organisers are expected to commit to two-years of service, this is a significant restriction for individual and associates. This in turn would limit the pool of viable candidates of the community that would serve as the General Chair, Programme Chair or senior organisers given the restrictions. For example, a senior individual may supervise a research student, and this would prevent the research student from submitting work to UKICER or CEP due to the CoI.

Appointment

The Proxy Chair is appointed by the UKICER Steering Committee in conversation with the General Chair and the Programme Chair.

The Proxy Chair must be a:

  • Senior Academic with track record of impartial and/or relevant service (e.g. External Examining).
  • A candidate that does not represent a Conflict of Interest (CoI) themselves with the chairs.

Conflict of Interest

The present proxy defines a conflict of interest inline with the Conflict of Interest Policy for ACM Publications.

Responsibilities of the Proxy Chair

The Proxy Chair is responsible for:

  • Managing the review process for all submissions where a CoI exists for the General Chair, Programme Chair or other senior organising members of the conference.
  • Upholding the integrity of the review process by ensuring a sufficient number of reviews from qualified reviewers that do not represent a CoI to the conflicted all authors.
  • Reaching final decisions on all conflicted submissions, including acceptance, conditional acceptance, rejection as well as desk rejection.
  • Maintaining the confidentiality and documentation for the entire review process and providing to the Chair of the UKSIGCSE board and UKICER Steering Committee to support audit and transparency purposes.