Constructing a good conference schedule for a large multi-track conference
needs to take into account the preferences and constraints of organizers,
authors, and attendees. Creating a schedule which has fewer conflicts for
authors and attendees, and thematically coherent sessions is a challenging
task.
Cobi introduced an alternative approach to conference scheduling by engaging
the community to play an active role in the planning process. The current Cobi
pipeline consists of committee-sourcing and author-sourcing to plan a
conference schedule. We further explore the design space of community-sourcing
by introducing attendee-sourcing -- a process that collects input from
conference attendees and encodes them as preferences and constraints for
creating sessions and schedule. For CHI 2014, a large multi-track conference in
human-computer interaction with more than 3,000 attendees and 1,000 authors, we
collected attendees' preferences by making available all the accepted papers at
the conference on a paper recommendation tool we built called Confer, for a
period of 45 days before announcing the conference program (sessions and
schedule). We compare the preferences marked on Confer with the preferences
collected from Cobi's author-sourcing approach. We show that attendee-sourcing
can provide insights beyond what can be discovered by author-sourcing. For CHI
2014, the results show value in the method and attendees' participation. It
produces data that provides more alternatives in scheduling and complements
data collected from other methods for creating coherent sessions and reducing
conflicts.Comment: HCOMP 201
