General Chair Duties
The General Chair is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the whole conference.
It is the General Chair's responsibility to appoint chairs, assign tasks to them, and generally oversee the work of each chair. (This does not include the Program Chairs or Local Arrangements Chair, who are appointed by the EACL Board.) The chairs that must be appointed include: Tutorial Chair, Workshops Chair, Student Workshop Chair, Demo Chair, Publications Chair, Publicity Chair, and Sponsorship Chair.
In addition to appointing the chairs, he General Chair has the following responsibilities:
- Help each chair prepare a timetable, and help ensure that all the deadlines are being met.
- Make a site visit to the conference site to approve and finalize local arrangements.
- Work with the Local Arrangements Chair (in consultation with Priscilla and the ACL and EACL treasurers) to establish registration fees.
- Work with the Program Chairs to create the overall conference structure (number of parallel tracks, workshop and tutorial scheduling, etc.). Later, work with the Program Chairs in developing the overall structure of the conference program (balancing papers, invited talks, business meeting, etc.).
Oversee the conference budget; see budgets. This includes coordinating with the Local Chairs, EACL and ACL Treasurers, and Priscilla on financial and organizational issues.
- The General Chair may produce a newsletter before the conference starts, although this appears not to be standard EACL practice.
The conference is supposed to be self-financing (at least); and losses are borne by the main ACL organisation. Thus costs (to support invited speakers, conference giveaways freebies, proceedings printing, etc.) must be weighed carefully against potential income from registrations and sponsorship.
Certain steps require oversight by the EACL Board; see the Actions and duties of the EACL Board in overseeing the conference. The General Chair must work with the Board to provide the required information in a timely manner.
ACL: General (conference) chair duties
Adapted from the ACL Handbook. Stephen Clark. October, 2013