New Feature: Breadcrumbs

We've made it easier than ever to find your way around ProposalSpace with breadcrumbs. Just check the top of any page to see where you are in relation to your Account Home page.

New Feature: Email Receipts

Call administrators can now track the status of every email sent through ProposalSpace! Just pull up any message sent via the Messaging Module and click the new Delivery Receipts tab. There you can see if the message was:

• Queued for delivery
• Not delivered (because the recipient requested not to receive messages)
• Rejected by the recipient's email server
• Reported as undeliverable
• Flagged as spam
• Opened by the recipient

If you included links in your message, you can also see if the recipient clicked on any of them.

We're really excited about this new feature. We hope you are, too. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, just let us know!

Data Export Improvements

Our Data Export feature now has an option to limit reports to certain types of proposals. This means call administrators no longer have to weed out unwanted proposals after generating a report. Now, you can just pick the status(es) you want to include.

Next up: The ability to select specific items from the submission and role forms.

New Feature: Scheduling Module

One of the most critical tasks for any conference organizer is building the session schedule. Not only do you have to figure out how to arrange the sessions so they tell a story, you also have to make sure you don't put someone in two places at the same time.

Unfortunately, we can't help you with the story-telling part (at least not yet). We can, however, help you easily check for scheduling conflicts with our new drag-and-drop Scheduling Module.

All you have to do is create a scheduling "grid" with your available dates/times and locations. Once the grid is built, you just drag and drop sessions onto it. If the system detects a conflict, it gives you the option to schedule the session anyway (ignoring the conflict) or to cancel the assignment. You can even move sessions around on the grid and the module will continue to warn you of any conflicts.

Where Is My Logout Button?

Some of you may have noticed some changes to the design of the site. We've been working on new features and needed a little extra "real estate" in order to keep things from becoming overcrowded. Plus, the average size of monitors (even on laptops) has continued to increase, so why leave all that extra white space unused?

For details about what got moved where, see our Design Notes.

Crowdsource, Curate, or Combo?

The most common model for selecting presenters for educational conferences is pretty straightforward:

1. Announce a call for proposals (or call for papers, call for abstracts, call for speakers, etc.)
2. Collect proposals
3. Have a committee of volunteers review the proposals
4. Select presentations based on the reviews
5. Build a session program that accommodates the selections

Although the process works for the vast majority of meetings, it's hard to argue that it can't be improved.

One suggestion we've noticed recently is to open the process up to crowdsourcing. Basically, the idea is to leverage the power of social media by turning over the selection (and possibly scheduling) tasks to attendees. For a more detailed explanation, see Michelle Bruno's post at TSNN.

Another suggestion, seemingly at odds with crowdsourcing, is to have a curator manage the selection and scheduling tasks. The idea here is that conferences, like museum exhibits or other curated collections, are far more effective if the content is carefully selected and organized to "tell a story" to attendees. For more information, see Jeff Hurt's post on Velvet Chainsaw's Midcourse Corrections blog.

So which is it? Crowdsourcing obviously works for larger conferences, like SXSW, but does it also work for smaller meetings with more focused content? And how about curating? Does it work for every type of conference or only for those that can be organized around a clear theme? How about a hybrid? Is it possible (or even desirable) to combine the two into a single model?

Review Groups Are Here!

A lot of conferences—especially larger ones—need to split up their review tasks among different groups of reviewers. Up to now, the only way to do that in ProposalSpace was to set up multiple calls, each with its own set of reviewers. Now, call administrators can manage multiple sets of reviewers in a single call!

Our new Review Groups feature lets call administrators set up an unlimited number of groups and assign an unlimited number of submissions, review chairs, and reviewers to each one.

Say, for instance, that your call asks each author to select one of five topic areas. Previously, if you wanted to assign a different set of reviewers to each topic area that meant you had to set up five calls. Now, you can just create five review groups within a single call (one for each topic area), then assign submissions, review chairs and reviewers to one or more of the groups. Permissions are based on the review group, so a review chair may only work within his/her assigned group. Call administrators, of course, can work within any group.