From the Chairman Robert G. Brown bob@acm.org This issue of APL Quote-Quad is the first of a series to be published in very rapid order. I would like to take this space to explain exactly what is going on, and provide some background into my thinking on other topics. What Happened to Quote-Quad? On February 23, 2002, The Special Interest Group Governing Board (SGB) held a meeting in Atlanta. The SGB is a group that consists of all of the SIG chairs, and other ACM volunteer officials. There is an executive committee (the SGB EC) that sits atop this group. The purpose of the SGB as a whole is to set ACM policy for all SIGs, to provide a forum in which SIGs act together, and to represent SIGs within the ACM organization as a whole. On that Saturday morning, I was greeted by the chairman of the SGB with the news that, because of continuing non-publication of APL Quote-Quad, the SGB EC had recommended that SIGAPL be reclassified as a "conference-only" SIG. As of last summer, the SGB requires that all SIGs be within 2 quarters of on-time publication at all times, or several extraordinary measures can be taken. Believing that the notion of providing a single product to our members (an annual conference, with a Proceedings) was not a good value proposition, I spent a fair amount of time and effort that day lobbying to reverse or at least postpone adoption of this recommendation. The outcome of that effort was a 6 month delay for any status change. To gain enough support for this, I had to agree to three actions. First, I had to dismiss the existing editorial staff and reorganize the way Quote-Quad is created (some members of the SGB told me this would probably be done in any case). Second, all back issues of Quote-Quad required to bring SIGAPL up-to-date would have to be published in 6 months' time. Finally, I would have to present a plan to keep Quote-Quad on schedule in the future. If all of these tasks were done, would retain our current status This issue is the first one created by a production team of four people who are stepping up to that challenge. We are fortunate in that the outgoing team left a considerable backlog of articles for publication, and we are working through that backlog, mostly (although not completely) in chronological order. Our production standards are not and will not be as high as the last team, and indeed it was the recommendation of the SGB and the ACM Publications Board to sacrifice some production values, cosmetic and typographic elegance in favor of timeliness and reliable publication. I welcome these changes in policy. They lead to a number of characteristics and hints at new activities across the spectrum of products and services that SIGAPL offers to our members and readers. Last year, I was elected on a platform of community and activism, and this is the agenda I believe we need to pursue. Expect to see a somewhat plainer Quote-Quad, but one that will meet or exceed your expectations for timeliness, frequency, and reliability. You can help by coming forward, as always, with articles, whether they are success stories, algorithms, references to APL in the popular press, or news of APL-related events. These pages are actually your pages; we’re only the stewards. The Consequences of Success Can we all rest easy, now that we have a more activist chairman, that somehow stagnation and silence have been vanquished? Nothing could be more dangerous or harmful! We all need to understand that everyone who has served SIGAPL has done so in a spirit of community service, and in good faith. We need to thank all of those who, in leadership positions, brought SIGAPL through some very difficult financial times, and back to a state of good health. Now we must move forward. In future issues, soon to appear, I will write about the project ideas we have developed so far, activities to which we can all contribute. In writing these messages, I want to hear from you, our ideas will need commentary, perhaps some refinement, and can surely be improved. Let’s take that route openly and together. Whatever agenda we adopt, we will need more volunteers to take projects from the idea stage into reality. We cannot be activists alone; there is too much work to do for the SIGAPL EC and the few volunteers who fill appointed positions. I look forward to a SIGAPL whose members are mobilized and engaged in advocating the use of array programming languages and related approaches to computing. June 2001, Volume 31, Number 4

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