Open Source Conference Management Software?

Jack Tanner asks: "Is there such a thing as a high-quality Open Source conference management software in active development? I'm helping run a web site for an academic conference, and it seems like there's no good software to organize the meeting and facilitate peer review. The state of the FLOSS art is seems to be that there's a reasonably modern LAMP application called Open Conference Systems, but the developers have announced that it's discontinued. There are also several apps that are claim to be open source, but aren't, once one reads the license. At the same time, large academic conferences play musical chairs switching from one half-baked free or commercial service to another every year, or write their own apps from scratch, repeating the same errors and wasting hard-earned grants. What's a conference organizer on a budget to do?"

"While no software will do all of these, the ideal application should:

• accept submission of abstracts and papers
• accept feedback on abstracts and papers from peer reviewers and automatically distribute it to authors
• keep a list of conference registrants (authors and non-authors)
• facilitate sending e-mail and snail mail announcements to registrants (all, only authors, only non-authors, only presenters, etc.)
• facilitate creation of the conference program (scheduling with separate concurrent tracks)

managing Open Source conferences

[Anonymous Coward]

high-quality Open Source conference management software

Are we talking something that manages to manage open source conferences? You'll need some kind of automation that keeps Stallman in place then.

... back to farming puddings ...

Re:Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Conference Softw

[croddy]

that link is in the summary, dude.

Don't write your own

[77Punker]

Since it's open-source, take that discontinued project and make your own out of it. If it's good, you'll have something good to start from. Add the features you require and contact the original authors and see if you can take over their website.

CMS

[pjay_dml]

Use a content managment system, that has modular extensions, such as Mambo [mamboserver.org], XOOPS [xoops.org], Drupal [drupal.org], or the like [opensourcecms.com].

I don't know of a particular module out there, that would fulfill your requierements, but I do know that a combination of modules would definetly achieve it.

You can always create your own module, by extending an existing. I believe this will be your best bet.

Pentabarf

[datenkeller]

Check out Pentabarf [pentabarf.org]. It is the Software that was used to organise the Chaos Communication Congress [www.ccc.de] and the upcoming What The Hack [whatthehack.org] conference. I don't know if the software fullfills all your needs but it might be worth a look. Btw. the project page is in german only, right now, so you may want to access it with some mean of translation.

Continue

[Anonymous Coward]

http://continue.cs.brown.edu/ [brown.edu]

It is supposed to be pretty good

Indico

[motte_fra]

http://indico.cern.ch/ [indico.cern.ch] published under GPL

Try this

[geminidomino]

Just take a look at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ [opensourcecms.com] and see if any of those fit what you like.

Cyberchair

[johndv]

Have you looked at cyberchair? (at http://borbala.com/cyberchair/ [borbala.com])

What's wrong with OCS?

[blisspix]

I've just started evaluating OCS for a conference myself, and I am confident that it will cover all of the program functions (submitting abstracts, routing for review, posting the program and schedules). I wouldn't use it for registration, but there are many many other systems for that.

Is there anything specific that you want conference software to do that OCS won't?