Here is advice on organizing a workshop or small conference, based on holding the 2008 Fall Workshop in Computational Geometry at RPI (FWCG2008) , with the help of Barb Cutler, local arrangement chair, Robin Flatland, and the Program Committee. Much help came from earlier organizers like Ileana Streinu and Joe Mitchell.

This is incomplete; suggestions and additions are welcome.

1.  Dates

Avoid Halloween; some people can not attend then.

2.  Initial policy decisions

1. Decide in advance with the Program Committee that no very late papers, even from prominent people, will be accepted. Apparently this has been an issue in the past.
2. Decide in advance the acceptance standards. We accepted every relevant paper.
3. Altho Easychair has an email facility for the Program Committee, using your regular email system permits the mail you send to be accessed w/o using Easychair and to be indexed together with the rest of your mail.
4. However, Easychair is the most convenient way to email all the authors, or only the accepted ones, and to send notifications.

3.  Submissions

Easychair is excellent for

1. accepting submissions,
2. managing reviews,
3. notifying authors
4. preparing a first draft of the table of contents and index.

4.  Abstract book preparation

This advice would also apply to proceedings.

1. What Easychair can provide:
   1. a zip file of the accepted paper (aka extended abstract) PDF files.
   2. LaTeX file for the table of contents. The information is taken from the info entered by authors when uploading their papers. At least one author entered his name differently on the form than on his paper. I let the TOC and index keep the version he entered on the form.
   3. LaTeX file for the index.
2. TOC and index editing required:
   1. Authors may use ISO accented chars, which LaTeX does not understand. They must be changed to LaTeX accented chars like {\'e}.
   2. Easychair, as least as I understood it, did not use correct page numbers. This required a tedious editing.
3. Invited speakers:
   1. To make things easy for them, I accepted any format, and manually converted the submission to LaTeX.
   2. I manually added them to the TOC and index LaTeX files.
4. Submitted paper editing required:
   1. The authors submitted papers in both letter and A4 format. The margins were often so small that there was no room to add page numbers and a running footer.
   2. Combine many PDF files into one file with pdftk, a linux program.
   3. After considerable searching for possible solutions, I bought for $42 a windows program called Advanced PDF Tools. It can scale and translate the pages of a PDF file. I scaled everything by 90% and translated them to make reasonable margins and leave space for a running footer and page numbers.
   4. Advanced PDF Tools also output all letter size pages, regardless of the input size. That is relevant because when pdftk combines PDF files, it outputs each page w/o changing its size, resulting in a PDF file with different pages in different sizes. I don't know but that might have caused trouble later.
   5. Another solution would have been to split the papers into separate separate PDF files for each page, and then write a LaTeX file to include all the pages, suitably scaled and translated, with page numbers and footers. Using scripts, this might maybe not be as bad as it sounds.
   6. However many submissions had their own page numbers, which looked ugly. I used pdfedit, a free program that edits PDF files.
      1. Initially, I used pdfedit to select and delete the page numbers from the PDF data structure. The resulting PDF file looked fine in xpdf and evince. However, when read in Acrobat, the edited pages sometimes had large blocks of text missing.
      2. The 2nd attempt was to overwrite the undesired page numbers with opaque white rectangles. That worked better, except for some pages that crashed pdfedit when accessed. I left those pages unedited.
   7. I added page numbers and a running footer with another free program, pdfpagenbr.
   8. I prevented the title page from getting numbered and footered by not combining in that PDF until later.
   9. Now the proceedings consisted of several PDF files. I combined them into one file with pdftk.
   10. I ran most of the windows programs inside linux with Crossover, a commercial version of Wine. One I ran inside windows inside Vmware.
   11. The resulting PDF file again had a portability problem. (PDF should be renamed NPDF for non portable document format). The fl ligatures in one paper appeared correctly when viewed by free PDF readers, but as blanks when viewed by Acrobat. Unfortunately, I viewed the PDF files with evince, but the proceedings were printed from Acrobat.
   12. I don't even know where that happened since rerunning some of the suspect programs didn't reproduce the problem.
   13. The printed proceedings of another recent conference had no page numbers. The moral is to thoroughly check the printed paper version before making copies.

5.  Schedule

1. Have sufficiently long coffee breaks, since people can't be herded back too quickly anyway.
2. We chose to have only one track.
3. That did make the days fairly long.
4. Since most of the speakers were grad students, I emailed everyone before the conference, warning them not to run long. That scared them so much that many talks ended early :-).
5. We had a poster session, but it was very small. Speakers were also encouraged to have a poster; very few did.

6.  What I could have done better

1. Start asking invited speakers earlier.
2. Specify the submitted papers' required format in more detail
   1. paper size
   2. no page numbers
   3. margins
   Not doing this meant that I had to spend a lot of time searching for PDF-munging SW and hand editing.

7.  What we did really right

1. Have several local people with varying interests to divide up the work.
2. Use Easychair.
3. Ask lots of people who did this before for advice, and put some on the Program Committee.

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