[OSGeo-Conf] Conference software

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 1:05 AM, Darrell Fuhriman <darrell at garnix.org> wrote:

> If OJS was used for the academic track, what was used for the regular track (and the review process).

Presentations and Workshops were submitted via SurveyMonkey. Someone
must have paid for a Pro plan on there, possibly the AGI already had
one.

These were collected into a Google Spreadsheet.

For voting we used Paul Ramsey's community vote system - I think we
supplied him with a spreadsheet (or CSV?) in the right form and the
magic happens, we get back the vote counts.

We then had a selection process where the committee assessed all the
submissions so we had one community score and one committee score.
Now, the exact numbers and details are hazy but the process went
something like:

1. We need 250 presentations.
2. The top 150 community score presentations are accepted
3. The top 150 committee score presentations are accepted
4. That came to, say 190 presentations due to overlap.
5. Look at the next top 50 community presentations, check for quality
and overlaps with existing acceptances, select some.
6. Look at the next top 50 committee presentations, check for
quality/overlaps, accept some.
7. Repeat 5 and 6 until we have 250 accepted presentations.

That seemed a reasonable method - the community vote was given a
privileged position, top presentations got in, but once we got down to
the lower orders we debated and considered more to get the programme
right. The programme probably wasn't much different than if we'd just
taken the top 250 community score presentations, but this made sure
everything was eyeballed. Also, there were some interesting and
important (in the cttee's opinion) talks that would have slipped
through the net if we'd not done this. W

I'm not sure what the workshop sub-cttee did for selection.

> Alternatively, could Symposion work for the academic track?  Obviously it would be useful to have everything in one place if at all possible.

You'll have to check with the journal about if it can fulfill the
workflow with respect to anonymity and reviewing. Another possibility
would be if the journal's own submission system (maybe they use
something like Manuscript Central) could be used for the AT, then all
the management is offloaded, and the only problem is then integrating
selections back into the conference system.

Barry