I think we should allow announcements because I'd like to see OR-Exchange completely replacing sci.op-research in the (near?) future. I like Siamak's suggestions above and I'd like to add one of my own: announcement posts could have an expiration date so that they can be automatically deleted once they become irrelevant.

Thanks for letting us participate in the decision process. I have a number of suggestions as following:

1. I totally agree that announcements are essential to maintain our community active. I just hope that it doesn't become like INFORMS list servers. They are flooded with job postings. And those are annoying for somebody like me, who already has a paid job (!) as a research assistant with the great (/and broke!) state of California.
2. Conference announcements would be fantastic. Especially if they are tagged properly based on topics.
3. The great thing about ORE (OR-Exchange) is that there are separate RSS feeds for separate tags, so it is more manageable for us users
4. Similar to the way we organize flash mobs to populate StackO with R questions, we need to populate ORE with IE and OR questions and answers. (May I answer my own questions?)

I'm a little late to this discussion, but here's my opinion.

I think OR-exchange shouldn't be used for job postings. There are lots of other places that are optimised for job postings, and have more sophisticated features such as expiry dates, filtering by location and industry, etc. Without these features, and mixed in with the regular questions, I suspect that the job postings will have the effect of spam on regular users.

Announcements are slightly more appropriate, especially since the answers could be used to indicate actual responses that may be interesting to the community, eg:

• For conference announcements, the answers could be used to indicate whether the users here are planning to attend, and their experience of past events.
• For notices about someone passing away the answers could be used to share condolences and positive experiences that the users had with that person.
• For changes in the OR world (new journals etc) the answers could be used to discuss and debate the merits.

I do think that the discussions prompted above would remain interesting even after the "event" has happened, and perhaps should not expire.

However, we also run the risk of them turning into spam. I suggest that we restrict the ability to make announcements. I'm not sure how customizable the site is, but there are plenty of features that are only available to different "levels" of users, such as editing posts, re-tagging, etc. We should make the ability to post announcements a power-user ability, and if the site allows the user promotions would happen automatically at a certain reputation threshold.

I'm not a big fan of conference/event/book, journal, software release/job opportunity announcements in a Q&A board (undermines the board's presence and positioning). In my opinion, there are other (way better) ways to spread/propagate these kinds of information.

I think conference announcements will be better than job postings.

I'm ok with announcements. I agree with Tallys about expiration dates; I'd be inclined to take Siamak's point about tags one step further and require specific tags for announcements, with some gentle prodding for first offenders.

Maybe you could somehow create a neatly organized weekly newsletter consisting of announcements, job posting, and conferences etc. and just post it on OR-Exchange.

I see that you have already made a decision, but try to feign a decent delay for others to post their opinions.

The main problem with conferences is that they mostly happen in the US, UK and continental Europe. Do you mean to sort them out by location and language? I believe that you have better things to do in your professional life than to embrace activities that do not promote the interest in OR. People at different stages on their personal pathways to OR are already checking up on this web site, and are surely able to find conferences in their far-away locations. What is the use of your telling me that you plan to stage a conference in, say, New Jersey, while I live in Lima? Do you expect me to take an aeroplane and attend your lecture? Yes, that is the main purpose of OR Societies, why would one would like to replicate their job? Have there been any quarrels inside INFORMS?

I strongly disagree with job postings. Please, remember that many job opportunities do not mention 'OR analyst', but that there may be a plethora of near-synonyms which may overload this good web site with unnecessary data.