What's wrong with your Call for Papers

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What's wrong with your Call for Papers
Authored by: allankellynet on Friday, May 02 2014 @ 11:22 am CEST

A sympathise with your post, I have the same issue myself.

But... I've also been on the other side of the fence, I have been involved with organising several conferences in the past and I'm still very active in Agile on the Beach. So I see it from the other side too.

First the form thing: its pain I know, as a submitter I hate the damn forms but as an organiser I love the fact that I have all the information in one place. We've done it with e-mail only for Agile on the Beach before and or poor conference manager has to spend a lot of time chasing people up for photos, bios etc.

Second, someones comment about multiple submissions: again its a pain to have to fill out bio multiple times. But as an organiser we don't want to spend a lot of money on this so we use the tools we can easily, and cheaply, put our hands on. Last year it was Google Forms, this year it was Contact Form 7. Minimal viable product.

Yes there are lots of conference systems out there and I'm sure many of them would do a better job but: we'd need to sort through them to find one and I know from other past experiences none of them is good, in fact (several years ago) they were all rubbish.

Third: synopsis.

This year for AOTB we did have "short" and "long" submissions. In reality we were overwhelmed (>140 submissions) we didn't real many of the long submissions.
I know there are two audiences but... part of what we are looking for is a submission which makes us want to go to the session, if we want to go then it is likely other people want to go. In other words: the audiences aren't that different. You are trying to persuade both that you are worth spending time with.

The conference scene is so crowded (many conferences and many people wanting to speak) that organizers don't need to offer anything great for speakers. If there is a speaker you really want then simply ask them direct. Making the submission system nicer is good and might bring in a few more submissions but you probably have more than enough anyway!

allan

What's wrong with your Call for Papers
Authored by: Dirk on Friday, May 02 2014 @ 12:29 pm CEST

Allan,
thanks for your comments. I've never been on the other end of a submission-based event (at TEDxStuttgart, we invite speakers and the amount of occasional free-form suggestions is manageable), so that information is much appreciated.

That the conference scene is crowded, as you say, is actually part of my point: As a new or relatively unknown speaker, an additional "why" field lets me share information so that I can tell the organisers why they should possibly pick me over one of the big names. The amount of submissions can be a problem, I guess, but that's part of what you signed up for when you decided to organise a conference :)

As for conference systems, I see frab being used for more and more conferences in the open source world these days. I have no experience in running it, but as a potential speaker it has everything I expect - including a field for additional notes to send to the organisers.