 Okay, so hopefully everyone should have had a chance to already go into open water and take a look at both the submission side and the reviewer side. You log in to open water the same way whether you're going in to submit an abstract or whether you're going in to access your judging capabilities. So you'll see this screen when you're ready to log in, Ryan's going to log in now. And it'll take you to a page where it kind of asks you whether you want to go into the applicant portal or the reviewer portal. In this case, you want to go into the reviewer portal. Once you're in there, you'll see different rounds. So currently you're seeing the first kind of three rounds, our preview round, our first choice round, our second choice round. These are really for demo purposes. As soon as the webinar is over, I'm actually going to close the other few rounds. So you should only see the preview round in there. If you've gone in and taken a look already, you will see that you should have a little bit over 50 abstracts in there for you to already take a look at and have kind of a head start on our preview round. The preview round will remain open until we close abstract submission. And that'll give you an opportunity to go in, take a look at them and start, you know, you can either download them as PDF. You can look at them online and really access them from anywhere, giving you the opportunity to really examine them before we get into the rounds. So Ryan's going to click open on the preview round. And you'll see he has four abstracts there to evaluate. The preview round is a little different than all the other rounds because the round isn't judged. Everything that you see in the preview round is going into the first round, no matter what. So all of the status, let's say not scored. He can open them, but he can't judge anything in this round. You'll also see below there's an option that says download all to PDF. So that's really if you need to be offline, you might be going on a trip or something, you want to read them on the airplane, something like that. You can download them onto a PDF. It'll show you the entire submission and it'll include all the submissions that are entered. If you open one of the abstracts, you'll see kind of the submission number, which might help you keep track of things too, if there are a lot of abstracts that are similarly titled. And you'll see the title of the abstract, the text and the author information below that. Also, you can see the session preferences there, which will kind of give you a heads up about what sessions the author is considering. Additionally, when the preview round closes, what we'll do is we'll send you an Excel sheet that has all of the abstracts within it. And that'll include all of the fields, including all the ones that you would be able to see here now. And what essentially that'll do is that'll make it easier for you to sort and see round by round, which abstracts are selected, which session has their preference for that round. And then also, you might want to keep an eye on when you're in the first round, how many abstracts have selected your group as their second choice, especially if they put the general session as the first choice. Knowing how many you had coming to you in the second round might affect your first round decisions. So when the preview round ends, what'll happen is all of the abstracts will be sent on, and this is kind of where you start seeing less and less abstracts. So for the preview round, you see every single abstract that's come into our system. For the first round, you're only going to see the abstracts that are assigned, that have selected your session for that round. So in this example, I'm going to make it so that, let's say, for the group that Ryan would be reviewing for, he has three abstracts that have been assigned to him for this round. And as I go through, and I'm doing the selection here, this is where most of the time is going to be taken, which is why you see a couple of days sometimes of a gap between when the round closes and then when the round opens. It's because on the other side of open water, we'll be assigning the abstracts to people as we receive information from you after your calls, letting us know that you're ready to select these abstracts, we'll be going into the system and essentially putting them in there and then reassigning them. If you choose to select them, obviously, they'll be taken out of consideration. However, if you don't choose to select them, in that case, they'll be going on to the next round and then we'll be assigning them that way. And let's take this opportunity to go over a couple of the timeline things and make sure that everyone's clear on the timeline of how we'll transition from round to round. And just starting at the beginning, we know that we have Monday, September 14th as our abstract submission deadline. We also know, confidentially, that we're going to extend that to the 17th. And I think we're going to be a little sneaky about it and just have the email blasts and announces that ready to go out at 10 o'clock in the morning on the 14th. So that way, people will hopefully work on the abstracts over the weekend. Then, when essentially the preview round is ongoing now, we always get some abstracts the day after and we usually accept those. So figure between September 18th and September 20th is the preview round. On September 20th, the preview round is going to end. So we will have sent you that big self-spread sheet that will let you track all of your abstracts that have selected you for the different rounds. Then on September 21st, it's going to be the start of the first choice review. And then the first choice review is going to go from September 21st to September 30th. We know that a lot of abstracts will select general session first round. I'm going to work with the program committee to see if they can make a first pass and release some abstracts to their second choice early on September 23rd or 24th. So that will also help you making your decisions. You won't be able to see those abstracts that have been passed on by the general session, but you'll know that they're now available to you on the second round. Then we need to have all first choices and to us no later than September 30th because then October 2nd, we'll start the second round. And if we don't hear from you, I mean, we will do our best to keep following up with you, but if we don't hear with you in the system, automatically, those abstracts that, you know, had your group as first choice, if they're not selected, they'll automatically go to their second choice. And then October 9th, that'd be the end of the second choice round. October 12th is the start of the third choice round. And October 15th is the end of the third choice round. So each, you know, the cycles of review get shorter because you're looking at fewer and fewer abstracts each time. Okay. So now that we've got a better idea of what our timeframe is, let's go in and see what a round would look like. So if you want to refresh, you can see that Ryan's going to sign three abstracts for this round. So if he opens that round up, this is going to be a little bit different than the other one. So when he opens an abstract, when he reads through it, takes his time, considers it, perhaps he's already read it through in the preview round and knows he's ready to select it. At the bottom of the page, you'll see an option that says save and next. At this point, he's asked the question, does this abstract meet your criteria for acceptance? So having read through the abstract carefully has decided that in his opinion, this would be correct for the session he's looking at, selects yes. At that point, when you hit save and finalize, that submits your review of that abstract. However, nothing here is automated. So even if all of the reviewers for that session go through and mark that they would like to, that that meets their criteria, the abstract is not automatically accepted. That's a conversation you guys will hopefully have. It's a nice way of looking in the system and seeing, oh, you know, we all did this, we all agree. It makes it very easy to kind of knock it out on the phone and then following that, you would get back to us, let us know what the title and ID number of the abstract is, the list of acceptances and the list of ones you'd like to pass on. We go through, we mark them in the system and then you're ready to proceed on to the next round. So looking at that, though, you see it looks like he only has three abstracts, two abstracts left. That's because once you've opened it up and made your judging decision, it moves into the review completed tab. So it's also a nice handy way of keeping track of your progress for you and it gives you a better idea of how much you have left to do. So you can reopen it, take a look at it again if you're interested, or you can go through and keep marking your acceptances and your declines. And so let's just go through, mark the rest of the round really quickly. So having read through this one, mine decides, you know, I don't think this is an abstract that meets the criteria for the session that we're trying to create. Or for whatever reason decides to pass on it, marks it no, save and finalize. And then for the following abstract goes through, makes an assessment about the abstract and chooses to accept it for the round. In that case, what happens then is that once you've confirmed with us whether or not which abstracts you've chosen to accept in that round, we go through and we either with essentially withdraw the abstracts and move on to the next round, or we would go through and say, and essentially release the abstracts to their next round. And so I'll do that really quickly. Yeah, and while Kate's doing that, again, what we kind of envision is that this will be a great tool for each committee member to, you know, go through and review the abstracts on their own, go through the selection process. But really what you're doing is generating a score that then the program committee would have would have a phone call and discuss and, you know, kind of assuming that, you know, if there are abstracts that every single person on the program committee accepted, and every single person on the program committee did not accept it, there probably wouldn't need to be a lot of discussion about those. And where most of the discussion would happen would be the ones in the middle. And then once you've had that call where you've conferred, you would get the list to Kate and I and then we would go through and move the abstracts forward. And none of these sort of internal scores will ever be given to the authors. So there's no need to worry that someone will, you know, think that they were accepted as three and someone else only is a 2.5 or anything. That's just, it's just all internal. So finally refresh the page, we can see that in this case, he, for the second choice round, we have one abstract coming to us that was released in the previous round. So he opens up, you see, you'd go through the same process and be able to make a judgment about whether or not you'd like to accept the abstract or pass on the abstract. It's the same process really for each round. Obviously, the kind of the real burden of time here is going to be having your phone conversation, making sure you're in agreement and then conveying your interest in abstracts to us. I'd like to open it up now to any questions. So we're gonna unmute everybody and hopefully give you guys an opportunity to ask any questions you have about open water. And I'd like to stress that at any time you have any questions about it, feel free to give us a call, send me an email, anything. Hi, this is Angela Campbell, VPG. And I'm just, I have a couple of questions. First of all, when you're downloading the PDFs on the first page, does that download all of the abstracts in total or is there a way to limit them? It'll download all the abstracts in total. And then what's just mentioned kind of a 2.5 or whatever number grading system, is that, is there anything, are there any numbers involved here or is it just a yes or no? No, it's a yes or no. The number is wrong. It's a yes or no. The numbers are, the only thing are, can everything, is everyone getting a really bad echo on it? Everyone getting a really bad echo on it? So that's what they're not getting echo on. So essentially what'll happen is, you'll have the PDF and each abstract download PDF indirectly if you're not interested in downloading the entire download all up and download all up. As for a number, most of that's something we see internally that allows us to know how many of the judges assigned to it have reviewed it. And that's really all that tells us. So mostly it's a number of judgment completion, I would say. It's not any kind of a system that a judgment is based on. But it will, it's an average. So it does show you, if everyone's looked at it and it says that it will, if you have three people on your committee, it'll have a three. It'll have a three. So yeah, it's more of a sort of an internal tool as you construct your phone conversation. Okay. Okay, and we will be able to see everybody on our own committee's responses that will be visible to all of us on the committee. In the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, when the ground is closer to being finished, ground is closer to being finished. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And I have one more question, although I feel like I'm the only one asking questions, but the BPG is a fairly large group. And at one point, I think it came up that we shouldn't individually submit our votes, but it sounds like now we should and then ultimately have a phone conversation and then call it in and then you will change it kind of behind the scenes. Is that correct? So we all enter as we will or as we want? Yeah, I mean, it's up to you. You could do it. Yeah, I mean, it's up to you. You could do it. You could do it. Or just, you know, you just have to create a spreadsheet and then put that into the conference call. I think probably, given the number of abstracts, you're probably gonna get that. It probably makes sense just to ask people to use the system and then have the conference call. And then just like last year, at the end of the first round, let us know which abstracts you're accepting and what you're passing on. So because of the echo, we did end up muting everybody again for a minute. What we might suggest is that if you type your questions in instead, that ought to reduce a lot of the feedback. Or I can unmute different, like Laura, go ahead and ask your question or you can type it. Laura says, I was wondering if we had an idea of how many papers we should accept? Well, then this gets into how much programming you're gonna offer. Think about that there are essentially four different sessions. The afternoon from two to five 30 on May 15th the morning from eight 30 to noon on May 16th. And then the shorter sessions on the last day, May 17th, 10 to noon and then two to four. And generally we think about a 30 minute paper and that's something that we kind of try to keep uniform across the specialty groups so that people can move between the groups to hear different talks. So each paper would be about 20 to 25 minutes delivered and then five to 10 minutes of Q and A after each paper and then people would move. So that works out to in each of the different blocks of how many papers you're accepting. Lynn is asking how final is final? Can we change decisions? Well, this gets a little tricky. I think it would be, it's very helpful especially in the first choice round that ends on September 30th that everything that you have your list and wanna accept it because then it moves on. If let's say you passed on something in that first choice round and now we're into the second choice round, it's October 5th and you decide you really want it, you can come back and let us know and if it hasn't been selected by the second choice, we can have a conversation with that second choice group. It's a little tricky if they basically had accepted it and just hadn't let us know yet, it kind of is their paper at that point but obviously if they are gonna pass on it then it would be wonderful if you accepted it. And this is the other point. The one thing that I liked about the base camp system for those of you who were involved in this process last year is it was an easy way for groups to communicate and I would suggest that we still do that via email and if everyone can stand the greater number of emails in their inbox, I suggest we kind of use our master email list that goes out for all of these calls and so for example, if book and paper really wants an abstract that put photographic materials first and book and paper second, feel free to email PMG and kind of ask them what their thoughts are. Do they plan to accept this abstract? If it's an abstract, that's not important to them but you really want it in your group, let the other group know. And what I can do is I have a spreadsheet right now that contains the listing of who's in each program committee for each specialty group. So that way hopefully we can make it easier for people to get in touch directly with each other. Um, Tram had a question. All right, go ahead Tram. You're unmuted. Tram? You may have to unmute yourself though. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Okay, and it's been answered, so thank you. Oh, it's been answered? Okay, thank you. Wonderful. Um, and then Lynn, did you have a follow-up question? Go ahead, you're unmuted. Lynn, you should be good to speak. Okay, we'll go back, I'll come back to her. Let's see, Kathy Francis just wanted you to say it again how specialty groups make final submissions to AAC but that's basically you just discuss amongst yourselves and then you send us a list and that's how we know. Yeah, and if you could like send us a list that says, you know, as a conclusion of the first choice round, TSG accepts the following abstracts and then put the numbers and the titles and then TSG passes on the following abstracts, the numbers and the titles. And so we remove the ones you choose from further rounds and then the ones that you don't are placed in final rounds. And this way, the reason we're asking for both the ones you're accepting and the ones you're rejecting is to make sure that we're not letting any abstracts slip through the cracks so to speak and we're making sure that decision was made for all of them. So I think that also answers Kate's question. Yet you go ahead and you individually say whether you accept it or not and then you have a conversation with your fellow program people about what you collectively all decide to. So you see both an individual decision and then a collective decision. And then from that, then we get a list of what you all collectively decide and then that's how we, what we use to move papers. Right, so unlike the abstract submission itself when it says save and finalize, it's not a cut and dry thing like that. Yeah. Angela Campbell asked if you could just go through those dates again. I'm sure any email will be... We'll email out. But yeah, we'll email them out. But let me, I'll just quickly go through them again. Monday, September 14th, there's the stated abstract submission deadline. We're going to be sneaky and extended to the 17th on the morning of Monday the 14th. We know that people will submit abstracts to the 18th with excuses. We'll go ahead and take them. So all during this time as abstracts reporting in, it's the preview round. The preview round ends on the 20th of September. And then the start of the first choice round is the 21st of September. We've built in a little bit of time because we have to essentially go in and assign judges when one round stops and another one starts. So the first choice review round lasts all the way from September 21st to September 30th. So I would suggest that you think about scheduling that call with your program committee when you're gonna go through everyone's selections or thoughts or how they rated the abstracts sometime between the 27th and 29th. And then on the 29th and 30th, be sending the list of abstracts that you've selected and that you've passed on in the first choice round to Kate and I. The first choice round closes on September 30th and the second choice round starts on October 2nd. In between there, we hope by the 23rd or 24th to kind of give you an idea of some early passes by the general session committee just so you'll have a little bit better knowledge about what you might actually in your second round choices be able to accept when that second choice round starts on October 2nd. The second choice round ends on October 9th and the third choice round starts on the 12th of October and ends on the 15th of October. Now, in the past, what some groups have done is they've had one call for the first choice and then one call for the second and third choice sort of making a decision about what they would do with any paper that might come to them on the third choice round. You can make this decision by just seeing how many papers you have coming to you on the second and third choice round and then also keeping an eye on what's happening to these papers if they're being selected in early rounds. Because essentially what we'll do at the close of bounds after we've received everybody's yay or nay on them and edited out, we'll send an updated spreadsheet so you'll be able to see which abstracts were selected. So if there's something that you know was supposed to come to you in the second round but was selected in the first round, you'd be able to see the abstract was already selected. Even if you knew it was coming down the pipe all the way in the third round, let's say it's first choice session selects it, you'd be able to see that as well. So that'll help you filter out and make better decisions about, am I expecting, I might not have that many submissions in the first round, but I know I have a lot in the second round that might affect how you judge things in the first round. Mary Catherine has a question about whether is there a way to filter the list of submissions in the preview round? There isn't, but as Kate mentioned, we will be sending an Excel spreadsheet at the conclusion of the abstract acceptance period, which is also the conclusion of the preview period. And then you'll be able to sort that based on the different choices and know who chose book and papers their first or second choice or whatever. Right, so you might just want to delete anything out of the PDF that's not applicable to your specialty. But unfortunately, no, there's no way to within open water edit it to be just the ones that have selected your session. Let's see, Kate has a question, will reviewers be able to see abstracts that list their group a second and third choice? Yeah, in the spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet and in the preview round. If you open up a paper, all the abstracts will have all the complete information, full text abstract, the different choices, and the author information and all that. That will all be there in the individual abstracts, but also you will be able to sort that spreadsheet. So that might be an easy way to, what you could do is when you receive the Excel spreadsheet, take a look, sort through and get the abstract identification number for all the abstracts that you know are for your specialty and then search for them in the PDF that way. That might be a faster way of doing it. But it is important to remember that you need to do that before the end of the preview round or use the one that we sent you. Because once you go into the first choice round, you will only see the abstracts that selected your first choice. So I know, Lynn, you also had a question about that. I mean, does that answer your question? You will be able to see the papers of the different sessions, for people who chose different session preferences. Either in the individual abstract, if when you open it up or in the spread, you can sort the spreadsheet to see who chose book and paper second. Okay, you got it. Okay, good. Sarah Barakast, will we see the final decisions as per the past in Basecamp or no Basecamp this year? Yeah, my sense is that's not used Basecamp this year, that it just might get to be sort of two parallel systems. When you email Kate and I, of course, we'll send that revised spreadsheet out at the start of the second round. So you'll be able to see what happened to the different abstracts and we'll keep doing that each round and then at the end of the third round, it'll be the final. Up until the, Lynn also asked a question, up until the end of the decision period, can we change our yes and no, yes. So basically, you just go into your view completed tab and you can open up the abstract of the ones you've completed and scroll down, save and next. And you can change your response. So if you go back and think, oh, you know what? I found some better abstracts, this no longer meets my criteria or whatever it is. And you just go back into that, go back into the abstract as in your completed category, change your response and save and go back to the list. And then you can keep doing that up until the period ends. Once the period ends, then things get reshuffled. Not until we hear from you. Right, after you've submitted your final say to Ruth and I, really that's kind of the end of that round unless it's a really dire situation you really absolutely need to change your decision. But if we don't hear from you, at some point we'll have to go ahead and once the first choice round is ended, at least make those papers available to their second choice. So I think Laura, that also answered your question. Yes, you just go back into the reviews that you completed, the review completed tab and change your response and you can do that up until. And because it's just an internal mark of yay or nay, even if you had marked it yes, if you're having your group conversation with your specialty group and you think to yourself and you're like, oh, I see that I did want to accept this, but I've changed my mind about it. I mean, so there's nothing that in the system that forces it to be accepted even if you have voted yes. Fiona has a question. Is there a mechanism for recommending an abstract be accepted as a poster or the minimum presentation? Essentially you would decline it for that round and at the end of the third round, the abstracts that have not been accepted in any round, we'd be happy to take the under advisement then and we have an additional poster round essentially because poster abstracts are open until October 1st. So we'll have plenty of abstracts coming in that people intend for them to be posters essentially all along. But if there's something that you've seen and you think if this isn't accepted in any round and you'd like to recommend that we reach out to the author and see if they're interested in accepting it as a poster instead, we can absolutely do that. Yeah, we pretty much do that anyway. Anything that wasn't accepted by any of its three choices, we do contact the author and ask them if they wouldn't like to consider it as a poster. We usually get them about a week to revise the abstracts. If it's something that can be displayed in poster form, but that would be great to know if you thought we'd make a good poster, we could add that in that particular email to that author. Yeah, so all abstracts, any abstract that's been declined, passed on, eventually makes its way to the poster round or popular? We do, we maybe weed out a couple that we obviously, this very theoretical or something that just can't be displayed as opposed to a major multimedia component or something like that. And Karen has a question, can you provide a list of email addresses of the Special Group program committees so you can communicate about abstracts across the different sessions? Yes, yeah. Yeah, I'll be sending that out along with the timeline. And if it's okay with everyone, I think just for simplicity's sake, we'll provide the emails for all the committees, but we'll kind of operate under the assumption that the Special Group program chair will kind of be the point person for correspondence between groups. Okay, Mary-Catherine has a question. When we submit our choices as a group at the end of each round, can we also send you notes or comments? Yeah, even an email, whatever the, you know, whenever your group like writes your email to us and you list the which ones you accept and which ones you decline, just include that commentary in the... Yeah, that would be fine. And then generally, this is sort of getting into like a second, AIC handles all of the rejections and we'd like to handle all of the acceptances, but if your group feels strongly that you would like to send out the acceptance emails, that's fine. So one reason we handle all of the rejections is that we try not to reject someone until we absolutely have to and until you go through the rounds. And then, you know, for the acceptances, we do ask, you know, we very quickly get the person in contact with you, but if there is some specific information about any abstract that you would like us to communicate with the author, we can do that. But we do ask that you hold off on any acceptances until after we've been able to get through all the rounds, that way somebody's not receiving an acceptance, you know, on September 20th, and then telling all their friends that they're so excited to be accepted at the meeting and somebody, I think we get like 500 emails from people going like, we're aware of my notification. Yeah, so that way we actually delay the acceptance isn't quite well into October because we try to get all of the rejections out, except maybe those that are still under consideration for the poster, and then send the acceptances. So the people who are not accepted by any of their choices are notified first, and then those that are being accepted are notified. All at the same time. All at the same time. Well, that's it for the question so far. Does anyone have any other question? Oh wait, maybe I missed one. Kate Lewis. Just, she's asking about recapping the dates that the rejections are sent out. That would be early, mid-October? Yes, it would be after October 15th, and it would, well, after October 15th is when the email, the rejection email will go out to people that essentially, the soft rejection, but I asked them if they want to submit a poster. So that would happen, and then so you're looking at end of October, maybe October 20th or so, we would get the acceptance emails out. Oh, and then just a quick word about, we do often, while this process is going on, get laid abstracts in. And my opinion about laid abstracts is that we take them up until when considerations are still going on, and then kind of leave it up to the specialty groups, how much weight they want to put on the fact that the person didn't meet the deadline versus what the abstract looks like. So, laid abstracts will enter whatever round they get themselves into. Laura, I had a question and it's actually a very good one. I don't think, we seem, we just like glossed right over that very important fact. But you, yes, you use your same AIC login, your same email address, primary email address and your same password to log into this system. The system will recognize it. You will, to navigate to the tool, you can either go to the abstract page, there'll be a link there, or you can go straight to aic.secure-platform.com. And go straight to that, and then that login there with your same AIC login. Sorry, aic.secure-platform.com slash A. So yeah, you use your same AIC login. So I would definitely double check and make sure, I did try to go through and make sure that if it was your primary email in our system that I used that, but generally speaking that's kind of been the issue with people having problems logging in is that there's been some kind of disconnect between the email that you typically use on the AIC login and the email that we may have been using in correspondence that I then used as your judging access email. So if there's a problem with it, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me. It's probably that simple. But did anybody else have any other questions? And we will probably try to schedule a special group call sometime between the 17th and the 24th of September, just some check-in either right before or right at the start of the first choice round. We'll do it as a call rather than a webinar, but this will also be kind of a, we can go over the dates and we can go over this process again a little bit if it need be. Okay, I think if we don't have any other questions, I think we'll be ready to. Michael has a question about logging in. Yeah, and we'll send how to log into the site in an email, like with the same email that will probably send out the dates, all those dates, the relevant dates will also send information about how to log in. Yeah, so our follow-up email will have three things in it. It'll have the listing of who's on the program committee for which session. It'll have our timeline updates and it'll have kind of just a little open water refresher on how you'll want to log in and access the abstracts. Okay, if there are no other questions, I think we can go ahead and in the webinar and everyone can go about their afternoons. Absolutely, and if you think of anything, please don't hesitate to call our email and hopefully we'll get that answered for you. All right, thank you. Thanks for joining us today, everybody. Take care.