Technical description

DC/ConfOrg proposes an electronic system to help in the organization of events like congresses or workshops. This automatic system has been developed in order to optimize the management of the scientific content of an event. It starts with the online registration of participants and finishes with the preparation of the proceedings in various formats (printed proceedings, Web site and CD-ROM), including the reception of authors' information, selection of papers by the scientific committee and online preparation of the programme of the conference. The complete system is available from a secured Internet connection. It makes easy the communication between all people who are related to the event: organizers, scientific committee, participants, authors.

The first generation of this system has been developed 6 years ago in the frame of various conferences organized by the Société Française d'Acoustique (SFA). Consequently, the evolution of the functionalities of the system follows the real needs of conference organizers.

The main functions of the system can be summarized in a few words as follows:

1. electronic submission of abstracts,
2. online review by the scientific committee,
3. online management of accepted and rejected abstracts,
4. online organization of sessions and time table of the conference,
5. reception of the final documents of the authors (full papers),
6. automatic generation of the proceedings (CD, Web, printed book), of the abstract book, ...
7. various tools devoted to the management of the database (search tools, statistics, ...),
8. tools to check the database integrity,
9. automatic generation of authors' indexes,
10. automatic numbering of the pages for the printed book, including table of contents and authors' index.

The link below gives an example of Web site generated by the DC/ConfOrg system for the Congress CFADAGA'04 (march 2004):

In addition to these standard functions proposed by the system, an optional module can be added to manage the online registration of participants. Although clients often have already such a registration system, the DC/ConfOrg system is regularly chosen since it is directly related to the submission system. As an example, registered authors do not need to re-enter their personal information when they submit their abstract. The DC/ConfOrg registration system also generates badges and labels for mass mailings.

General overview of the system

The following diagram illustrates the different steps in time of the management of the scientific content using the DC/ConfOrg system:

Online submissions by authors		Online registration
Online review by the scientific committee
Notification of authors by email
Sessions and programme of the conference		Online programme
Reception of complete documents, presentation files, ... from authors
Automatic generation of documents		PDF volumes ready to print, including page numbering, table of contents and authors' index
		Internet Web site, search engine and index
		CD/DVD-ROM (supported by any OS), same user interface and functionalities as the Web site

Main advantages

• Optimization of the organization:
  - Automatic management of all documents,
  - Many repetitive and heavy tasks are no more necessary.
• Communication between involved people:
  - Automatic emails generated by the system,
  - Important information can be transmitted easily and fast,
  - Workload is distributed between organizers.
• Reliability:
  - Many inconsistency checks of the whole database,
  - No errors in preparing the proceedings (page numbers, indexes, ...).

More information

You can obtain more information from DC/ConfOrg.
You can also contact me by email: didier.cassereau@espci.fr.