Tip: Link Directly to Your Call

We designed ProposalSpace so that authors can find calls easily, using our Find a Call feature. Once a user is logged in, he/she just has to click a button to see all the calls in the system that are active and accepting proposals. There may be times, however, when you want users to be able to bypass this step and go directly to your call. To do this, just use the special link provided on the Call Settings page. Anyone who uses this link will be taken directly to your call's main page. (If a user isn't logged in, he/she will be asked to log in first, then be automatically redirected to your call's main page.)

Virtual Conference Tug-of-War

For years now we've been told that virtual conferences are destined to replace traditional, face-to-face meetings. "Experts" (who usually work for companies that produce virtual conferences) keep insisting that people are clamoring for the chance to "attend" conferences without all the hassles of travel, pandemics, bedbugs, whatever. But despite the inconveniences, people have continued to flock to conferences, giving organizers little reason to make the switch. Until now. Thanks to the global economic downturn, conferences are seeing sizable drops in attendance. Could this be the tipping point? Has the audience for virtual conferences finally reached critical mass? Not yet, if you ask the attendees. The Winter 2009 Impact Study (PDF) from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) surveyed over 8,500 members from 97 associations and found that:

"...reports of a vast migration from face-to-face gatherings to online alternatives appear to overstate the case. Of people who only attended in-person events last year, only three percent say there's a high probability they'll only attended [sic] virtual events this year. In fact, if there's a migration at all, it's going the other way: Nine percent of people who only attended virtual programs last year say they're likely to attend only a face-to-face meeting this year."

So with virtual meetings becoming more attractive to organizers and attendees not yet willing to give up face-to-face meetings, who wins the tug-of-war?

New Feature: Public Calls

At ProposalSpace, we don't just want to be the one place conference organizers can rely on to find great presenters, we also want to be the one place presenters can rely on to find great calls. So we've added a new feature on the public side of the site that lists every call for papers we can find for just about every type of academic conference—regardless of whether the organizers use us to manage their abstracts or not.