I am my department's Promotion and Tenure (P&T) committee chair, which means I also have to serve as departmental representative on the College of Sciences and Humanities P&T Committee. My college is divided into three domains: natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. For historical and somewhat arbitrary reasons, my department is in the natural sciences domain, so I am also on the Natural Sciences Domain Subcommittee of the College of Sciences and Humanities P&T Committee (or NSDSCSHPTC for short).
The first order of business at the first meeting of the NSDSCSHPTC was to elect a chair. I have not been on the college P&T committee since the institution of a college-level fourth-year review procedure, so I suggested that whomever is chair should be someone who has done this before. My friend Tony mentioned that he had been on the committee last year and was quickly and unanimously elected chair. The next order of business was to elect a secretary. One of the other committee members observed that the secretary's main responsibility is keeping track of time during deliberations and that modern timekeeping devices are powered by software. I was thereby nominated to the position and then quickly and unanimously elected.
I made a quick joke about how, being a Computer Scientist, I did not trust software. Then I heard about the timekeeping process, which involves strictly timing a three-minute opening statement, a twenty-minute deliberation period, and, by majority vote, theoretically endless ten-minute extensions to the deliberation. My next thought was that software can make this better.
So it came to pass that, on a Saturday afternoon that involved my being up in my office in the Robert Bell building for a few hours, I put together a Promotion and Tenure Timer. It's written in Flutter, is licensed under GPL v3.0, has its sources hosted on GitHub, and you can use it online at https://doctor-g.github.io/PTTimer.
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