August 20, 1997 (5a)

This is to clarify some elements of my last email.

Some of you have nominated additional excellent haptics experts to the
Governing Board.  As I envision the structure of Haptics-e, in addition
to the "Governing Board," there will be an "Editorial Board" which will
be a larger set of people who will compose the entire set of haptics
experts working on and controlling the journal.  I imagined the
"Governing Board" to be sort of a "Board of Directors" overseeing the
Editorial Board at the strategic level.

Since the journal has no sponsoring society, we do not have the
overseeing function of a Society's "Publications Commmittee." As an
example of the need for such a board, consider the case of eventually
replacing members of the editorial board and the editor.  The idea
would be that the Governing Board would select the new Editor.

Another analogy is the "International Permanent Committee" which is
established to guide certain independent conferences but which is not
the conference committee.  Thus the idea was to make this a small group
with a long term perspective and experience and representing the
various constituencies.  Making it small will help to ensure speedy
decisions and may eventually make it possible to have physical meetings
should the need arise.  A second reason to keep it small is to create
future spaces if needed.  In the course of seeking non-financial
technical affiliation with existing societies, we may need or want to
offer a seat on this board to a representative of the society.

However in my last email I had not completely thought this through.
That email defined the Governing Board by:

  First I would like to nominate a "Governing Board" who will oversee
  Haptics-e and formally vote (by email) on policy issues.  The main duty
  of the board members would be to keep focused on the end goals we all
  share for a highest quality, state of the art journal reflecting the
  best of haptics research which takes full advantage of modern
  information technology.  They will be asked to review policies for the
  journal and vote yes or no on them.  Detailed drafting of policies
  would be left to task groups (which board members would be welcome to
  join if they want to).

Perhaps we should modify this to make the supervisory role clearer
and define the role of the Editorial Board:

The Governing Board will:

Ratify the election of the journal editor and the members of
the Editorial Board and deliberate and vote on issues of overarching
strategic importance for the journal such as future aliances
with technical societies. The GB will also determine its number
of members (in no case less that 12) and will nominate and elect
replacements to its membership from among the Editorial Board.

The Editorial Board will:

Ratify the policies and procedures of the journal, solicit papers
for the journal, perform and solicit quality reviews of manuscripts,
and volunteer for task groups targeted at specific problems or 
opportunities for the journal.

The structure of the journal would thus be:

		[Governing Board]
			 |
      [Editorial Board]-----[Editor]
             |          \ /    |
             |           X     |
             |          / \    |
    [Authors & Reviewers]  [Task Groups]

Working level supervision of the task groups would be by the Editor.
Ratification of final policies developed by the Task Groups would be by
the Editorial Board.  Also the Editor would have final say on approval
of manuscripts.  The Editor and EB would have a "checks and balances"
relationship with each other.  

(I propose that "ascii art" be banned from Haptics-e!).


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