MENTORING

It is always difficult to enter a new field. This applies both to students deciding on their new topic of research and to researchers and practitioners that are already established in other fields. To help overcome the hurdle of entering the hypermedia field, Hypertext 2000 provides a mentoring service as an offer to newcomers (authors who have never published a full paper in earlier Hypertext proceedings).

Mentors are experienced persons from the hypermedia community that have volunteered to assist new authors in entering the field of hypertext and hypermedia. A mentor is not a co-author and will not assist in the actual writing of the paper. Instead a mentor will read a preliminary version of the paper and provide friendly and constructive comments on how the paper, in his or her opinion, can be improved to better match the style of papers that are usually accepted at Hypertext conferences. Thus, the author still has full control over and responsibility for what is written in the paper.

The mentoring process is strictly confidential:

• Submitted papers will bear no indication of whether or not a mentor was requested.
• None of the program committee members (except for the program chair) will know which authors requested a mentor.
• The mentor will not reveal the things that have been discussed with the author.

Mentoring requests: email information about the paper including the title, the author name(s), and the author affiliation(s), contact information (mailing address, telephone, fax, email), an abstract of about 200 words, and several topical keywords to the Mentoring Chair Uffe Kock Wiil <ukwiil@cs.aue.auc.dk> as soon as possible and no later than 6 December 1999 (since the paper deadline is 17 January 2000).