[Air-L] Conferencing software for next year

Ulf-Dietrich Reips ureips at genpsy.unizh.ch
Thu Oct 23 09:55:35 PDT 2008 

Hi,
I have used conftool at General Online Research conference in three roles:
1. participant, 2. reviewer, and 3. as a former organizer who longed 
for such a system dearly.

As a participant I generally welcomed the tool in '07 as a structured 
guide for everything related to the conference. On the downside, 
however, I disliked
- yet another registration process
- a number of usability issues (missing fields, forced response in 
some superfluous fields, lack of internationalization, navigation 
issues etc.)
- no networked display of authored and co-authored papers (I could 
only see my own submissions, not those I co-authored)
- related: despite the database behind the tool it is not possible to 
import and reuse data previously submitted to the system. One has to 
type in everything again and again, both from one submission to the 
next and also for co-authors who previously registered
- having to log in to being able to look at the program; the program 
was always displayed in a weird format
- past programs are not interlinked anymore (DGOF only has links to 
the older programs up to GOR'06 at 
http://mail.dgof.de/filenotfound.html)
- programs are not searchable (they were in the earlier GOR 
conferences, see for example http://gor.de/gor04/index_3.html).
This year there is a checkbox one is forced to check, if one wants to 
continue the submission of a paper. The text reads "Mandatory: I 
agree that my uploaded files (e.g. slides, poster) will be published 
on the conference website. (You will have the opportunity to revise 
details of the files shortly after the GOR.)".

As a reviewer/member of the International Board I found it extremely 
aggravating to find out that the conference organizers' 
implementation of conftool contained a bug that erased all reviewers' 
comments to the authors before I alerted them to the fact. Even 
though they had a highly skilled programmer working hours and hours 
on conftool. I thus experienced what easily happens with such "magic 
systems" - the conference board had given away so much of its 
responsibility by trusting "the perfect system" that they first 
weren't clear on whose responsibility it was to respond, then denied 
the problem, then took the stance that the verbal feedback was of no 
importance (only the ratings).
On the upside the system is able to automatically generate statistics 
about submissions and participants that support conference planning 
at all stages, and it also takes a load off of the organizers' 
shoulders by sending automated feedback and by integrating with 
payment systems.

Finally, as a former organizer of that very conference I can imagine 
how much time and work can be saved. And a well-working Web 
application seems almost a *must* for our type of organization. It 
feels embarassing if Internet-related organizations don't make use of 
net technologies. But then, if they make use of it and fail...

A last point: The rating procedure in conftool (10-point scales) 
suggested a degree of precision that was really not needed/ignored. I 
know of one colleague who had submitted two talks: the one with the 
lower ratings was accepted as a talk, the one with the higher ratings 
was accepted as a poster only.

I guess much of the decision boils down to *how* the tool is 
implemented and maintained by the conference organizers. Be prepared 
for unpleasant surprises if you use it for the first time.

Best --u



At 11:56 Uhr +0200 23.10.2008, Tobias Escher wrote:
>Conftool is used by the General Online Research conference 
>(http://www.gor.de/gor09/conftool_en.php) and I've found it very 
>useful to manage registrations and submissions - both for the author 
>as well as for the organizing team.
>
>Maybe someone from last year's GOR in Hamburg could share some of 
>the experiences?
>
>best, tobias
>
>Sonja Utz wrote:
>>Hello,
>>
>>we have used conftool
>>http://www.conftool.net/
>>There is a small version with less functions which is free for 
>>small conferences (less than 150 participants) and a more 
>>sophisticated one with a lot of functions: submitting abstracts, 
>>submitting full papers, managing reviewers and the results of 
>>reviews, send bulkmail to groups of people (authors, reviewers, 
>>reviewers who have not completed their reviews yet), registration, 
>>scheduling of the talks and so on.
>>
>>cheers,
>>
>>Sonja Utz
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>Dr. Sonja Utz
>>Department of Communication Science
>>VU University Amsterdam
>>De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
>>phone: +31 20 5989184
>>email: s.utz at fsw.vu.nl
>>http://www.sonja-utz.de
>>
>>-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
>>Van: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
>>[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org]Namens fred at bytesforall.org
>>Verzonden: woensdag 22 oktober 2008 20:49
>>Aan: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
>>Onderwerp: Re: [Air-L] Conferencing software for next year
>>
>>
>>I thought my colleagues organising the foss.in conference in Bangalore
>>had some Free (as in Freedom) Software/Open Source code available for
>>managing their mega event. But I could not find a link to what exactly
>>they're using.  See a link to their registration system (currently
>>up): https://foss.in/2008/register/speakers/addSpeaker.php
>>
>>Trawled freshmeat.net and found
>>OpenConf
>>A conference management system, including workshops & symposia.
>>http://freshmeat.net/projects/openconf/
>>
>>See this discussion on Slashdot, but I can't find too many useful
>>links up there:
>>http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/02/1954247&tid=215&tid=185&tid=4
>>
>>Sourceforge.net has eight or so options:
>>http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words="conference+management"
>>
>>Yet Another Conference Management System
>>YACOMAS (Yet another conference management system). A Conference
>>management system written in PHP and MySQL
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/yacomas/
>>
>>Conference Management System
>>COMS is a Technical Conference management system. It provides a web
>>interface for managing a conference. Some of the brief facilites
>>include submission of papars by authors, reviewing those paper by
>>reviewers and conference supervision by the chair.
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/coms/
>>
>>CMS - Conference Management System
>>CMS is built based on the SOA design principle and it offers a nice
>>looking web UI and a simple web service interface. It utilizes maven2,
>>struts2, axis2, jboss, ejb3 and many other java technologies and
>>tools.
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/conf-management/
>>
>>phpConfMan
>>PHP based Conference Management, Attendance Tracking, & Certificate
>>System (for Continuing Education Units - CEUs).
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpconfman/
>>
>>Web Conference Management Tool
>>WCMT is a PHP-MySQL based tool for the management of scientific
>>conferences and congresses. It allows the convenor to manage the
>>review process of a medium to big sized conference.
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/wcmt/
>>
>>iConf
>>This project aims to provide a conference management system.
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/iconf08/
>>
>>TMTSYS 2.0
>>TMTSys is a conference management system. It has been used for IEEE
>>APWCS 2003, MMRC Workshop 2003-2005, IEEE ICCE 2006-2008. The version
>>2.0 has been released with some new interesting features. The user
>>interfaces are simplified.
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmtsys/
>>
>>Confman
>>Confman is a web based system for conference management
>>http://sourceforge.net/projects/confman/
>>
>>FN
>>
>>2008/10/22 I Kushchu <ik at mgovernment.org>:
>>>Actually, I also would be very glad to hear some feedback on conference
>>>software.
>>>Kushchu
>>>
>>>On 22 Oct 2008, at 18:34, Ingbert Floyd wrote:
>>>
>>>>I'd be interested in hearing about them on-list. Maybe I'm the only
>>>>one, but I think it would be interesting to see a group discussion of
>>>>conference system requirements by internet experts. While we might not
>>>>be able to implement them, it could help us all evaluate such systems
>>>>better *before* we obtain the necessary experience the hard way.
>>
>>
>
>
>--
>Tobias Escher               :: Oxford Internet Institute
>DPhil & Research Assistant  :: University of Oxford
>tobias.escher at oii.ox.ac.uk  :: 1 St Giles
>tel: +44 (0)1865 287210     :: Oxford OX1 3JS - UK
>fax: +44 (0)1865 287211     :: http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/
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