Subject: [Tools-team] Re: Conference Submission Tools

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:08:26 -0400

Answering both your emails at once.

James Kempf wrote:
> Hi Henning,
> 
> I'm trying to get IETF to consider EDAS for Internet Draft submissions. My
> experience so far with it is good, but I think IETF should do due diligence
> and compare it with others.

I'd be happy to make EDAS available for the purpose. However, I believe 
that, like most conference management tools, the submission part is 
actually only a tiny part of its functionality. It has lots of other 
parts, like reviewer management, conflict-of-interest resolution and 
such, that are of no use for I-D submission.

Scale is not an issue: EDAS currently manages about 10,000 papers a 
year, probably more, and has about 50,000 unique registered users.

You can try it out, as a guest user using the test conference, at 
http://edas.info/

> 
> I've heard that there are 4 or 5 conference submission tools. Do you know
> what the others are?

There are lots. 
http://www-adele.imag.fr/~jmfavre/ENSEIGNEMENT/CASDETUDE/Conferences/ 
has one summary.

>  James Kempf pointed me at EDAS, which I was not familiar with,
> in connection with the tools-team work on defining requirements
> for an automated draft submission tool for the IETF.
> 
> As I understand you're the author of the system (and maintainer?)

Correct.

> I'm wondering about the feasability of adapting this to IETF's
> needs; whether you'd permit this to be done; and the cost (if any?)
> associated with giving the IETF access to the source for adaptation.
> 
> If it is feasible to adapt EDAS to the IETF needs, it would be a
> pity not to explore this possibility. 

In my personal opinion, I would recommend against trying to use a 
conference management system, except maybe as an inspiration or 
short-term measure. (Certainly, EDAS, and other such systems, as is, 
would beat the current manual system...) Among other reasons, 
conference management systems I know do not have two vital functions:
- versioning (submitting updated versions of a draft)
- chair approvals (for WG -00 documents)
- automatic generation of appropriately structured listings

I'd be happy to provide my experiences based on running very large 
conferences, where authors submit thousands of papers on very short 
notice (sound familiar? :-).

Having written several such systems over the past decade (EDAS as well 
as a large process management system for my department), my opinions:

- Stay away from any system written in Perl or any system that does not 
use standard, widely-available libraries for forms generation, tables 
and similar functionality. (This includes many JSP and Java servlet 
systems). Ignore this advice if you believe that the system once written 
will remain the same forever and will require no changes.

- Java servlet systems tend to be brittle. Just ask NSF FastLane on 
deadline days....

- The hard part usually ignored by writers of such systems is people 
management. Unless you have biometric identifiers, you will get the same 
person into the system under several different user id's. There needs to 
be functionality to merge identities, typically by an admin. (EDAS has 
this; many other systems don't, which is ok if you manage a single 
conference, not good if you manage events over a long time span.) You 
need people management to allow managed updating of I-Ds.

- Web upload works most of the time, but ftp, with automatic sweeping, 
is sometimes needed. (We find that web upload doesn't seem to work well 
for large files and slow links.)

While it may be more painful initially, my recommendation would be to 
write a system tailored to the task. It will cost a few thousand $, but 
trying to make review systems (i.e., conference management system) do 
I-D submission duty is probably shortsighted, as much of the 
functionality will be different.

If you care, I'd be glad to give you more of my 2c.

>             jak

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---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 07:56:12 -0700

Hi Henning,

Thanx for your insights. Your experience with EDAS would certainly be
invaluable in developing an automated document submission system for IETF,
and I hope the tools-team can work with you on it.

            jak

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Henning Schulzrinne" <[email-masked]>
To: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 8:08 PM
Subject: Re: Conference Submission Tools