Anyone who has submitted to Agile on the Beach in the last few years will have used our submission system: Mimas. Like so many other conference we, or rather I, created our own system.
“Why does AOTB have its own submission system?”
Flippant but true answer: because nobody else (yet) has decided to share out system. I’m more than happy to host other conferences
Perhaps the actual question should be:
“Why create your own system when there are others out there?”
Yes, good question. Well, two (plus one) reasons really.
One: About five years ago when I got fed up of the Heath-Robinson combination of Excel sheets, Google sheets, HTML and a little Python that I was using nothing fitted. If I recall correctly Papercall was just started. While many commercial conference management systems had a synopsis module most of these didn’t do public call for papers and they cost money. I thought about using CyberChair/EasyChair but these are quite off-putting and needed hosting.
Things have changed a bit now so I might not make the same decision today.
Two: I was really very keen to give submitters feedback on their submissions and this was missing from most systems. This is an agile conference and agile is all about feedback so we should give feedback shouldn’t we?
Hillside’s Pasture can do this but is quite a niche system and I’m not sure it could handle the load we get. Similarly the Agile Alliance have a system for their conferences which gives feedback but having submitted I wasn’t impressed.
So that was then. What about today?
Having our own system has allowed us to do things we wanted: like a public review with over 50 reviewers this year. Or changing the voting system.
Of course that comes at a cost: my time to change the system, my stress in keeping the system up (a lot lately). O, there are some charges for the Google Cloud but these are trivial, a less than $1 a year and most of them are down to one report I run repeatedly during the review processes.
Those might be reasons for keeping Mimas but really my overhead should encourage me to kill it. Of course, I’ve grown to love my code and while I admit is stinks in places (the look of the UI) I’m proud of it.
But, the over whelming reason right now for not moving to Papercall (or similar) is: Speakers.
There are more speakers and potential speakers than conferences. Possibly the money to be made from a conference submission system is not from the conference organisers but from the speakers who want to submit to conferences. A bit like advertising the service could be provide for free to conference organizers if submitters paid a subscription.
And I have met speakers who tell me the go to Pepercall (or whatever) and submit to conference X. Then look down the list of other conferences they fancy and make the same submission multiple times. That is valuable to potential speakers.
But, that ease of submission is a problem for organizers. Particularly organizers who want to give feedback.
Easy submission for speakers means more work for reviewers.
As a conference organizer I don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry submitting to my conference. AOTB already has about 300 submissions a year, and as I’ve noted before some of these smell as if the submitter really doesn’t know much about us and hasn’t thought through the submission.
The interests of speakers and organizers are not aligned.
One way of solving this problem would be for conferences to share reviews. So if a speaker submits, say, to AOTB and Agile Cambridge and Agile Alliance then each conference can see what others thought of the submission. I could imagine that working.
I can also see obstacles. First of all: data privacy.
More troublesome I wonder if that would actually make it more difficult for new speakers to break in. The same old hands, with the same good reviews, would come to dominate the conference circuit and new ideas wouldn’t get in.
So there you go. AOTB has its own submissions system and I’ll tell you more about that next time.
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Allan Kelly, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Why does AOTB have its own submission system? Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
