MINICONF
CONFERENCE
MANAGEMENT

May 2020

MiniConf

MiniConf is a virtual conference in a box. It manages the papers, schedules, and speakers for an academic conference run virtually. It can be easily integrated with interactive tools such as video, chat, and QA.

MiniConf was originally built to host ICLR 2020 a virtual conference with 6000 participants and have been used to host a wide variety of major conferences.

It is designed to be:

Links

Demo system: http://www.mini-conf.org

Source Code: https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf

Get Started

> pip install -r requirements.txt
> make run

When you are ready to deploy run make freeze to get a static version of the site in the build folder.

Tour

The MiniConf repo:

1) Datastore sitedata/

Collection of CSV files representing the papers, speakers, workshops, and other important information for the conference.

2) Routing main.py

One file flask-server handles simple data preprocessing and site navigation.

3) Templates templates/

Contains all the pages for the site. See base.html for the master page and components.html for core components.

4) Frontend static/

Contains frontend components like the default css, images, and javascript libs.

5) Scripts scripts/

Contains additional preprocessing to add visualizations, recommendations, schedules to the conference.

6) For importing calendars as schedule see scripts/README_Schedule.md

Extensions

MiniConf is designed to be a completely static solution. However it is designed to integrate well with dynamic third-party solutions. We directly support the following providers:

Acknowledgements

MiniConf was built by Hendrik Strobelt and Sasha Rush.

Thanks to Darren Nelson for the original design sketches. Shakir Mohamed, Martha White, Kyunghyun Cho, Lee Campbell, and Adam White for planning and feedback. Hao Fang, Junaid Rahim, Jake Tae, Yasser Souri, Soumya Chatterjee, and Ankshita Gupta for contributions.

Citation

Feel free to cite MiniConf: bibtex @misc{RushStrobelt2020, title={MiniConf -- A Virtual Conference Framework}, author={Alexander M. Rush and Hendrik Strobelt}, year={2020}, eprint={2007.12238}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, primaryClass={cs.HC} }

Organizers

Alexander Rush
Developer
Cornell Tech, Hugging Face / @srush_nlp
Hendrik Strobelt
Developer
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab / @hen_str