The Program Chair (herein "Chair") manages the conference process. Once signed in, the Chair is able to access a series of menus (links) that allow setting various options (e.g., open/close submission and reviewer sign in, topics, accepted paper formats, etc.), viewing submitted papers, assigning reviewers and advocates, emailing authors and reviewers, accepting/rejecting papers, viewing reports, and so on. We encourage you to review our online demo or your own OpenConf installation to familiarize yourself with the various Chair options and features. The guide below, although not intended to be comprehensive, should help you get started.

Note that in OpenConf, the term advocates (aka champions) is used to mean a member of the Program Committee. And references to Review Committee members (herein "reviewers") will typically also include Program Committee members.

Getting Started

Following are the typical first steps a Chair will want to take once OpenConf is installed:

1. Sign in to OpenConf. The default username is "chair" and password is "openconf". If you are using the OpenConf Hosting Service, the username and password are those entered in the sign up form. Should you forget the username or password, you may recover the information by clicking the "i forgot it" links next to each field.
2. Change Password. If the system has the default password configured ("openconf"), you will want to click Settings -> Password to change it.
3. Review Configuration. Under Settings -> Set Config you can make changes to various OpenConf configuration settings. At a minimum, you should change the following:
   • Chair Email
   • Confirm Email
   • Conference Short Name
   • Conference Full Name
   • Conference URL
   • Reviewer Sign Up Keycode
   • Program Committee Sign Up Keycode
   • Paper Formats

   A description of each setting appears next to their entry in the Set Config page.

4. Set Topics. Prior to opening up submissions or reviewer sign in, the topics for the conference must be set. Topics are used in the automatic assignment of papers to reviewers and for some reports. The default maximum number of topics is 30. This number may be increased in Settings -> Set Config.
5. Open Submissions and Committee Sign Up. Once you have OpenConf properly configured, you will want to allow paper submissions, and for reviewers to sign up for an account. This can be done by clicking Settings -> Submissions & Sign-In, changing the appropriate options to open, and clicking the Change Options button. The appropriate options at this stage are: Submit Paper, Edit Submission, Re-Upload Paper, Review Committee Sign Up, Program Committee Sign Up.
6. Invite Reviewers. You will now want to email separate invitations to potential reviewers & program committee members to sign up for an account. Don't forget to include their respective sign up keycode (which you set in the Review Configuration step above) in the invitation.

We will leave the call for submissions in your capable hands.

Closing Submissions, Starting Reviews

When it comes time to close submissions, you can revisit Settings -> Submissions & Sign-In and set Submit Paper to Closed. You may want to leave Edit Submission open so that authors can update their email address, organization, etc.; authors will not be able to edit the submission's title or topics if Submit Paper is closed.

If all review and program committee members are signed up by now, you may want to close the committee sign-up options. This would also be an appropriate time to manually set any paper/reviewer conflicts; reviewers with the same email address and (optionally) from the same organization as a paper's author, are automatically considered in conflict for that paper.

Now comes time to assign program committee members and reviewers. You have the option of doing this manually or automatically; either way you can manually make changes after the initial assignment. As program committee members (advocates) can be automatically assigned to their respective papers as reviewers when using the automated reviewer assignment feature, we would suggest assigning program committee members first. Look for the Assign review and Assign advocates menus under the Review Committee and Program Committee sections respectively.

You can check whether there are any missing assignments as well as track the status of submitted reviews and program committee recommendations by clicking the List/Unassign Reviews and List/Unassign Advocates menus. Via the Email menu, you can email all reviewers & advocates, or just those with missing reviews/recommendations.

Accepting/Rejecting Papers

Once all reviews and recommendations have been received, you may want to close committee sign-in, via Settings -> Submission & Sign-in, to prevent further changes.

Next, you can Review Paper Scores & Accept/Reject Papers under the Program Committee section. Here you have a view of all papers, including the average review score with weight, advocate recommendation, and program committee decision. By clicking on the score, or program committee decision, you will be taken to a page where you can view all reviews & comments for that paper as well as set/change the program committee decision.

Once all decisions are finalized, you can visit the Email menu on the Chair's main page to send out acceptance/rejection notifications.

Security

A word about security in Openconf ...

All passwords are stored in hash form. Lost passwords cannot be recovered, but may be reset (with a new one).

The Chair is encouraged to change the chair account password, and the review and program committees keycodes; the latter so as to avoid bogus sign-ups. Changing the default chair username is also a prudent step.

OpenConf does not encrypt the communication traffic between a user's Web client (browser) and the OpenConf server. In order to have this additional layer of security, your Web server must support SSL and have a certificate available.