Commence takes paperwork out of meetings

A University of Queensland electrical engineer has taken the hassle out of organising international conferences by building computer software that does the work for you.

The free conference and meeting management system, called Commence, allows users and reviewers to upload, edit, share, and review documents worldwide and automatically sends acceptance or rejection emails.

It manages scheduling, prints name tags, and organises proceedings into a form suitable for the web, CD, or print.

It’s been created by Associate Professor Brian Lovell, the Director of Engineering programs at UQ’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering with help from UQ students at St Lucia and Singapore.

“It basically does all the paperwork involved in running conferences for about 500 or 600 people,” Associate Professor Lovell said.

“Once it’s installed, which takes less than five minutes, all conference management can be performed from anywhere in the world using a browser on the internet.

“I have often managed my conferences from my laptop over the wireless network at Singapore Changi airport.”

He said he started building Commence several years ago after running various conferences and finding that existing software was inadequate.

“I thought if I was going to do it for myself, I might as well make it freely available to the rest of the world.

“I think that’s the sort of thing that good universities should be doing — putting code out there for the world to use.”

Commence has been used to run about 20 international conferences by other major universities on subjects as diverse as computer vision to radiation oncology

It has been translated into Italian, French, Portuguese and Chinese and receives about 4000 hits and 160 downloads a month.

It is currently ranked in the top five percent of open source projects on SourceForge, the world`s biggest repository of open source code and applications.

Commence can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/iaprcommence/ as a 1.5MB zip file.

Media: Associate Professor Lovell (+61 07 3365 4134, lovell@itee.uq.edu.au) or Miguel Holland at UQ Communications (3365 2619)