IMPORTANT: This collection of information is no longer maintained, and most of the information is long out of date. For instance, the CyberChair software, and other programs, have superseded the ones I link to from here. I am not aware of a good website that takes the place of this one, but feel free to suggest one so that I can link to it from here.

For example, instead you might wish to see my advice regarding running a PC meeting and organizing a workshop.

Resources for conferences and workshops

This page is the beginning of a repository for software, forms, and similar materials helpful to conference and workshop organizers. If you can add to this list, please send mail. Traditionally, this sort of information has been handed down via folklore; I hope that this collection can aid this often-repeated process and make it less scattershot.

Calls for papers

Here I could mention some likely places to send the CFP. This depends on the focus of your conference, but a good place to start is SIG Newsletter Editors (editors_sig@acm.org) and/or the SIG Information Directors (infordirs_sig@acm.org).

Electronic paper submission

• STOC '95 supports electronic submission.

Assigning papers to committee members

• assign.m, a Mathematica program by Peter Lee
• assign.c, a C program by Bert Halstead

Referee report forms

• IDL '94: referee form
• PEPM '94: referee form and how to process it with LaTeX from Harald Sondergaard (harald@cs.mu.oz.au)
• POPL '95: referee form
• IR '95: referee form

Summarizing referee reports

• munge, a Perl program hacked by Peter Lee and, more recently, Michael Ernst. Sorting, triage, papers with no high-confidence reviews, controversial papers, output in text or LaTeX, with or without confidential information.
• reviews, a C program by Hans-J. Boehm which provides summaries and sorted summaries, with or without confidential information.

Sending form letters

• send-letters, a Perl program by Peter Lee, works with the munge program and form letter templates.
• A tar file containing form letter awk scripts by Hans-J. Boehm, his review program, and Halstead's paper assignment program.
• ICS '95 final paper information

Registration

I don't know of any software to help with this; it's typically done by hand.

Producing proceedings

For ACM conferences and workshops:

• Authors are encouraged to typeset camera-ready copy using LaTeX and the acmconf.sty document style or acmconf.cls document class.
• Authors of accepted papers must sign the ACM copyright form (PostScript format); also see the memo on ACM Interim Copyright Procedures and the Author's Guide to ACM Interim Copyright Policies.

Other resources

There are so many sources of conference announcements and proceedings that I cannot hope to keep a list of them up to date. Mark Leone maintains a list of programming language conferences. Dale Miller maintains a conerence information index, and Martin Weichert has a list of conferences. More such resources can be found via Web searching tools.