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Topic Committee Deliberations

Dear Community,

Tuna has already mentioned some of these things but I thought I would 
update you about the Topic Committee's deliberations.

The committee voted to limit the number of areas on the ballot to 
five and to utilize the following voting procedure: each 
committee member will rank order each topic area paper from best to 
worst and I will tally the cumulative results.  Some of the reasons 
discussed included trying to avoid a significant amount of vote 
dilution, the responsibility of the committee to evaluate the topic 
areas to be placed on the ballot and concerns about the low number of 
schools who vote in the process.  (I and Russ both posted on the L a 
couple of weeks ago asking for input on this decision but got very 
little feedback.)  

However, I really do want to thank you all for 
your discussion on the L concerning the merits of each topic paper.  
I think it has been quite helpful.  
 
I would also like to sincerely and heartily thank all of the authors 
of the topic area papers.  It is a wonderful service to the community 
and the time and care they took in developing the areas shows the 
care and concern that these individuals have for our activity.  It 
was truly wonderful to have so many good choices.

My thanks also to the topic committee members for serving the 
community in this way.  This is a difficult and busy time of year 
for everyone.  I am especially pleased that we got to work with Jenny 
Barker, the student representative to the committee this year.

 I also wanted to share with you a brief description of 
the criteria we talked about.  (Tuna already discussed this a bit)  
-salience of area to students -currency of area -differences from 

recent topics  -variety among the areas  -perceived interest by 
community   We also talked about -ensuring the adequate division of 
ground  -"library friendliness"/adequate literature in mainstream 
journals  -potential scope of the topic -relevance of 
domestic/foreign policy topic area and other issues.

The deadline for the committee's rankings is today.
I will let you know as soon as I receive and tally all the results.

Best,
Carrie
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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