Conference manual

This is a howto for how to arrange a major conference event like a project. This manual contains a lot of useful information, but it is in no way comprehensive, so use judgement.

Chapters

• Conference organization - Roles and responsibilities in the conference project.
• Conference program - Guidelines for producing an excellent conference program.
• Conference workshops - The NeIC way and stance on conference workshops.
• Conference communication examples (internal) - What to remember to include in various conference related communications.

Roadmap

• T-18 months
  • Local host selected.
  • Invitation for co-financing to stakeholders
• T-12 months
  • Conference budget decided
  • Conference dates announced.
  • Hard deadline dates announced.
  • Startup meeting of the #program committee invited.
• T-8 months
  • All first-round speaker invitations sent out, 1w deadline.
  • Conference website feature complete, so it's possible to publish confirmed information through it.
• T-6 months
  • Session titles final, speakers and chairs confirmed.
  • Workshop tiles, formats and abstracts sent in to program committee.
• T-4 months
  • Registration opens.
• T-2 months
  • Presentation titles and abstracts sent in to program committee.
  • Workshop agendas sent in to program committee.
  • Workshop organizers send out pre-workshop surveys to participants.
• T-1 months
  • Workshop organizers host pre-workshop meetings with participants.
• T-1 week
  • Presentations sent in to program committee.
• T0
  • Event opens.
• T+1 month
  • Workshop reports delivered to Conference reporting.

Schedule

Lessons learned:

• Parallel track workshops and single track conference are good.

Links

• Gadget ideas [1] (internal)