CONFIOUS: Managing the Electronic Submission and Reviewing Process of Scientific Conferences

Abstract

Most scientific communities have recently established policies and mechanisms to put into practice electronic conference management, mainly by exploiting the Internet as the communication and cooperation infrastructure. Their foremost objective is to reduce the operational and communication costs but to maintain high quality reviewing and the fairness of the evaluation process. Interestingly, we report on experience gained by an implemented system named Confious. Confious [8] is a state-of-the-art management system that combines modern design, sophisticated algorithms and a powerful engine to help the program committee (PC) Chair to effortlessly accomplish a number of complicated tasks and carry out the necessary activities to produce the proceedings of a scientific conference. We are principally interested in (a) describing the workflow dynamics of a real-world scientific process, (b) identifying the main concerns of the person in charge of the conference organization, (c) providing mechanisms that enable the efficient management and monitoring of the overall coordination process.

Confious comes up as the combination of the words Conference and Nous, where Nous is the Greek word for Mind. Therefore, Confious may be interpreted as the Conference Mind.