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@fsw.vu.nl http://www.sonja-utz.de
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org]Namens fred@bytesforall.org Verzonden: woensdag 22 oktober 2008 20:49 Aan: air-l@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=...
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@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@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/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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