Jon,

The conference and the journal are run fairly differently (did anybody
from the journal get back to you?).  The journal's actually organized
(from what I can tell).  It uses WordPress

The conference, on the other hand, uses a crazy mish-mash of things
that changes from year to year.  CfPs are handled by email (which I
would really like to see changed this year, since invariably one or
two gets lost and they're formatted all crazily differently).  These
are then put into a custom voting "machine" (the first year it was a
Backpack page and a bookmarklet, last year a standalone RoR
application) and the voting is open for a period of time.  We haven't,
to date, used the Drupal voting module (although it comes up every
year) because nobody has gotten it to work satisfactorily for
presentations.

The voting applications, I might add, haven't been without their share
of criticism.

At some point, I think a dedicated 'conference application' is
necessary for Code4lib, something that can take submissions, vote on
them, build the conference schedule and host the videos, as well as
deal with delegates and whatnot.  Last year's voting booth (nicknamed
ConferenceKeeper) was designed to do this sort of work, but it really
needs some sort of official blessing or alternative.

Speaking of alternatives, have you looked at Open Conference System:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs
?

Good luck,
-Ross.

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:58 AM, Jonathan Blackburn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> John,
>
> This is really good to know - thanks for the info!
>
> The committee I am on needs to make a decision pronto so I don't think
> we can wait, but I would be interested in taking a look regardless as
> you near completion.
>
> Thanks,
> Jon
>
> On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 12:40 PM, John Fereira <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Jonathan Blackburn wrote:
>>>
>>> Don't mean to clutter up the list, but I am on a team that is
>>> considering using Drupal for a conference collaboration site
>>> (including submitting/voting on topics, user profiles, etc.) and
>>> wanted to see what Code4Lib was using both for its journal
>>> submissions/moderation AS WELL AS topic voting.
>>>
>>> If the person managing either of these systems can shoot me an e-mail,
>>> that would be great!
>>>
>>> (Or, if anyone else has created a conference site using Drupal, that
>>> would be wonderful, as well.)
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I haven't seen a Conference management site developed using drupal but for
>> the past few years I've maintained the conference web site for JA-SIG.  It
>> was written many years ago at another university and I volunteered to take
>> over the maintenance of the code (I didn't know what I was getting into at
>> the time).  While it's mostly functional it is extremely poorly written
>> (some of the ugliest java code I've seen) so when it *doesn't* function as
>> desired it's difficult to figure out what's going on.
>> A couple of months ago I began work on a complete redesign of the system,
>> basically as a g-job.  Since my programming skills are strongest in a java
>> environment the new system is being developed in java, using the Spring
>> Framework (I've developed several other sites/applications using Spring).
>>  It's being built on top of the Apache Jackrabbit content repository
>> (JSR-170) to manage most of the site content.  While it's primarily intended
>> to be used to manage future JA-SIG conferences I'm building it such that
>> it's flexible and can use templates for creating Conference web sites for
>> any other organization as well.  It's all being developed using open source
>> software and I hope to make it available as an open source application.
>>
>