Conferences have grown a bureaucracy around organized and institutionalized activities. This is where we need a more holistic events platform which takes care of and empowers the entire range of events operations. Explara brings to you one such platform.

1. Improving Conference Management A new
Technology Paradigm.

2. Conferences are one of the more widely
used formats for collective discourse,
involving a huge number of participants.
Organizations which have discourse as
a core activity – such as academic
institutions – spend a great proportion of
their time in executing conferences.
Introduction

3. In this Presentation , we will primarily
focus on academic conferences or
symposiums and attempt to get to a
more reasonable execution approach
than is currently in place.
In order to understand the scenario
better, we would go through the
evolution of conferences over the ages
in brief and its current form.

4. History
Over varied topics – ranging from politics and intrigues to
mundane casual affairs. Even in this primeval form, it reflected
the modern knack for generating knowledge through churning
available ideas.
The Buddhist Councils and the Christian Ecumenical Councils
were primarily motivated by the wish to weed out differences
and smoothen out rough edges between various internal
ideological factions, through the tool of discourse

5. This basically means that – similar to most organized and
institutionalized activities conferences have grown a
bureaucracy around them and the core activities have
gathered a huge amount of extra operational mass around
them.

6. Current Ecosystem
The current academic conference space can be broadly
divided into two aspects –the organizer institutions or
research bodies and the research participants.
This includes planning, budgeting, finance, deciding the
topic, appointing reviewers, allocating a certain number of
papers to each reviewer, inviting abstracts, managing
paper submissions and reviews and finally
conducting the actual conference.

7. This includes planning, budgeting, finance, deciding the
topic, appointing reviewers, allocating a certain number
of papers to each reviewer, inviting abstracts, managing
paper submissions and reviews and finally conducting
the actual conference.
Even if we leave aside the complexities involved in each
of these individual aspects, the sheer magnitude of the
entire operations demands a sophisticated, dedicated
and time-invested human effort of massive scale

8. Challenges
This means that 1.8 million days are spent in scientific
conferences every year. Surprisingly, only about 30% of
this total number of days or around 0.54 million days are
spent in actual work. The rest of the days or around 1.26
million days a year are needed for back and forth
communication in order to maintain operational sanity.

9. The following is a list of challenges, which
academic and research organizations face
while conducting conferences.
• Wastage
• Inefficacy
• Uncertainty
• Less Control

10. Technology-Based Solutions
Most of these players are good at only one or two chosen
areas of event management and not capable of handling
the entire gamut of operations.
What the academic conference industry needs is a
technology paradigm, which can hand hold them for the
entire spectrum of conference operations, starting from
registration and in-venue management to abstract
submission and paper reviews

11. Only the availability of such a holistic paradigm
would be successful in taking away the problems of
the academic conference management domain

12. Case Example
The sheer range of activities and extent of areas,
Explara covers, clearly shows that it does not
only intend to support collaboration and
communication among various elements in an
event, but that it is meant for an all-round
support, which includes activities like in-venue
ticketing.

13. There are 2 specific tools of Explara, which can come to the
assistance of conference organizers. One is Emaxio – the
mobile app builder tool – and the other is Submix – the
paper submission tool. Emaxio is a mobile app builder
environment, powered by Explara.

14. Conclusion
However, due to the general fragmented nature of those
platforms, something more comprehensive is required.
This is where we need a more holistic events platform
such as Explara, which takes care of and empowers the
entire range of events operations, from registration to
in-venue management and paper submissions.
[Read full version of this whitepaper here: https://in.explara.com/solutions/whitepapers]

15. Explara
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