This is a brief description of how the FossConf software works.

Please add your comments and questions at appropriate places.  

Philosophy

The software aims at helping to conduct a conference in the most transparent possible way, at the same time has enough controls to prevent anarchy and chaos. The workflow is as follows:

• The general public can view all the content of the site. If anyone wants to interact with the site, he must register. The registration process is designed to keep out bots. Manual spammers will have to be manually dealt with.
• Once a user registers he has to fill in his profile - only occupation and lastname are mandatory fields. When he does so, he becomes a delegate and gets listed on the site. Date of registration is also listed to avail of early-bird discounts. The list of non-delegate users and email addresses of everyone is available only to select admins. If someone can write a reportlab script to generate a pdf of the delegate details with photo, the delegates themselves will be able to print out their id cards. The delegate's name is formatted as 'lastname' 'space' 'firstname'. If the delegate does not follow the lastname, firstname convention, he may just put his full name in the lastname field. He may leave the firstname field blank. Or he may fill in the two fields in such a way that the end result is what he likes.
• The software does not distinguish between delegates, speakers, volunteers etc.
• A delegate may offer to speak - he does so by adding one or more talks. There can be multiple speakers for a talk.
• A list of all proposed talks is available and can be rated. Only registered users can rate and it is one man one vote. The user cannot change his rating (if he wants to he has to ask the admins).
• A speaker may edit his talk/details at any time.
• He will have to ask the admins to delete his talk if he wants it deleted.
• Acceptance of talks can only be done by the admins.
• The talk scheduling takes care of allotting talks to halls and will be done by the admins. Scheduling can be changed at any time
• Talks can be tagged - and will be allotted a colour depending on the tag

• The admins can set up a series of volunteer tasks. Once this is done, delegates can add themselves as volunteers and ses: elect the tasks they offer to do. This list also goes up - the reason is obvious A volunteer may edit his details.

• There is a facility for admins to add static pages. Each static page will have a menu name associated with it and the name is automatically added to the menu list. For example this page has been cut and pasted into the navigation static page.
• People can be given the right to make posts. A post can have one photo - this is optional. There is a gui editor for posts, and the software will more or less correctly format stuff cut and pasted from Microsoft or Open Office. Registered users may comment on these posts.