Workflow

Conferia.js is designed to fit right into any conference organizing team's workflow. However, since it is an additional piece to juggle, it is crucial to embed any steps necessary to adopt Conferia.js at the right time to keep the overhead minimal.

If done right, we expect that you will need to account for a single additional person-day of about 8 hours to make it work.

Precautions

Before integrating Conferia.js, you should make three precautions to ensure you are all set for using Conferia.js for your conference.

Deciding to Adopt Conferia.js

If you wish to offer an interactive agenda to your conference participants, you should make the decision to integrate with Conferia.js in the early stages of your planning. We recommend making this decision before the call even goes out to ensure that the entire team is aware that Conferia.js is part of the organization effort and everyone can be on the lookout to account for the library throughout the effort, including how the abstract submission system is set up.

Requirements for Conferia.js

After deciding to use Conferia.js, you should immediately start to make the necessary preparations to use Conferia.js for your conference. The library has been designed to be extremely resource-efficient. You do not have to write any code to use it, and we have ensured that the library does all the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the actual academic part of your conference.

Nevertheless, the library does have a few simple requirements that you should get sorted out as soon as possible:

• You will need to have some web space where you can upload HTML code (typically a conference website).
• You need to be able to upload a CSV file that is publicly accessible.

These requirements can be easily met. We have developed Conferia.js with many common setups in mind so that most organizers should be able to use it. Some common ones are:

• Custom Conference Website: This is the easiest way. Many scholars tend to create their own conference websites, either from scratch or via GitHub Pages. In those cases, you already have all prerequisites for using Conferia and have additionally a lot of flexibility to customize the library to your needs.
• Managed CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc.): The next-best case is a managed CMS that many universities offer for conferences. It is important to test out how to include Conferia.js early so that you know what you need to keep in mind.
• WYSIWYG Website Builder: Some universities and institutes have very restrictive setups where you are merely allowed to edit some text and images on the website. In those cases, it can be a bit more difficult to set up Conferia. However, in the past, we have had some conferences in this setup and it was possible to talk to the IT department who were happy to help out to ensure we could use Conferia regardless.

Oddities with Exporting

Some spreadsheet software has some quirks when exporting to CSV, and this might become an issue if you are not prepared. Especially the dates need to be in the ISO 8601 format, and, for example, Google Drive, does not retain the format, even if you add it in.

The library offers you a set of options that you can use to work around such quirks, but you need to be aware of them. Please take a look at the configuration documentation to learn all about the ways to mitigate any software quirks you have.

Step 1: Prepare the Schedule

To use Conferia.js, you will need to provide it with a CSV-file (Comma-separated Values) that contains a set of fields which need to conform to certain requirements.

The library assumes that you will plan the conference schedule with all sessions, presentations, and keynotes, in an Excel spreadsheet (or, alternatively, Google Drive). We recommend that you create the template for this spreadsheet as early as possible and have a meeting where the organizing team is informed about the format so that no mistakes happen when the spreadsheet is filled in.

The spreadsheet must contain one event per row, with a set of columns that correspond to the event type. To learn about all required fields, please consult the CSV Format Documentation.

Step 2: Fill in the Schedule

Once the acceptance letters are sent out, it is time to fill the schedule. In the past it has proven great to divide up the schedule into sections. We recommend you place any workshops or tutorials at the beginning, followed by the keynotes and special events. Afterwards, add a section for all coffee and lunch breaks, followed by any social events in the evening(s). After those "special" sections, you can start adding your parallel sessions with all their presentations.

The reason is that you typically know early on which workshops or tutorials are going to happen, and neither lunch- nor coffee-breaks withdraw their attendance. This means that the most volatile part where you will need to add and remove presentations as the conference approaches is in one place.

Finally, when it comes to adding all presentations, this is typically a large amount of events in the hundreds. We recommend you export a long list of all accepted presentations alongside their titles, author(s), and abstracts, and place them in the spreadsheet before sorting them into individual sessions. Of course, this also depends on whether sessions are set prior to submission, or will be formed based on what came in.

Step 3: Testing Locally

Once you have a first draft of your schedule, we recommend that you test this locally. By exporting your spreadsheet to CSV and loading it in a minimal HTML file, you can see if everything looks good. Oftentimes, there will be subtle errors that become clear only once Conferia.js attempts to load your data, and by testing locally, you can ensure that you catch those issues before they cause detriment for your participants.