A case study in coordination: Conference Management on the Internet

The purpose of this note is to informally specify a case study in coordination describing a real world problem. The case study concerns peer review and evaluation of submissions to scientific conferences exploiting the Internet as the infrastructure for communication and cooperation. More precisely, we intend to specify a system for supporting all the activities which typically have to be performed by a number of people widely distributed all over the world to submit, select, and prepare the set of papers which will be published in the proceedings of a scientific conference. The goal is to build the final version of conference proceedings, including a list of accepted papers. Following the idea that “coordination is the management of dependencies” [1], conference workflowmanagement is concerned withmanaging the dependencies of activities (the workflow) necessary to produce the proceedings of a scientific conference (and of course the list of authors invited to present their papers). Most scientific communities have established policies and mechanisms implementing some kind of conference management aiming at minimizing the organizational efforts but keeping high the quality of papers being accepted and the fairness of the selection process. It is a usual choice that a program committee is established to take decisions about which papers are accepted and which are rejected. Authors interested in presenting their work submit papers to such a committee for review. Within the committee, a group decision has to be taken according to some fair policy. The decision is usually reached by reaching a consensus or voting or ranking submissions with the help of several reviewers who help the PC members in evaluating each paper. We believe that the proposed case study presents interesting coordination issues to study. It involves a set of coordination activities and requires coordination as aworkflow itself. The case study can serve as an example of a real life application with prominent coordination aspects. The case study is sufficiently familiar to most scientists, who normally participate to conferences as either