HICSS Conference Management System

As part of my continued work for HICSS, I work on the design and development of our own conference management system. Some requirements of the system are as follow:

System Functionalities

• double-blind review process:
  • paper submissions, resubmissions, and final submissions
  • paper reviewing
  • reviewer assignments
• virtual conference features:
  • upload of presentations and
  • scheduling of synchronous virtual meetings
• conference registration

User Roles

The different roles that a user can have are:

• author
• reviewer
• chair (conference, track, or minitrack)
• conference organizer
• attendee

Conference Phases

As submissions begin April and the conference takes place in January, there are various phases during which the various roles can see and do different things. This includes phases such as:

• initial submission / resubmission / final submission
• review assignment
• reviews
• decision making
• conference phase
• and others

I’ve developed the system using the Phoenix framework, a relational Postgres DB, and S3 for file storage. As the sole developer, I maintain the code in a private Gitlab repo. The application is hosted on AWS using mainly AWS Fargate, AWS RDS, AWS S3, and AWS SES.

I’m currently looking into porting to a Typescript-based tech stack that keeps the relational DB as is, but makes use of React for frontend matters and hasura.io for providing a GraphQL API. While it’s been a lot of fun learning the Phoenix framework, a major drawback is that it’s simply lesser known, which can causes problems when trying to find other contributors for the project.

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Link: HICSS Conference System