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CRP

CRP is conference management software by Dirk Grunwald. His documentation is at http://crp.sourceforge.net.

This page provides CRP-sensys06, a snapshot release of the modified version of Dirk Grunwald's CRP (version from Sourceforge CVS as of December 15, 2005.). Great thanks to him to releasing his code, and to allowing me to release this modified version!

This code was used to run Sensys 2006. "It worked for me" on Fedora Core 4. (Mostly, see below for details.) Your milage my vary on other OSes. It continains a number of extensions and modifications to Dirk's code base, so you can point to me for any errors, but he gets the credit for the base system and lots of prior hard work.

Who Should Use This Software?

The question "who should use this software?" is really two sub-questions: "who should use CRP?" and "who should use CRP-sensys06?".

Advantages of CRP:

• you can host your own server (own your own data)
• you can directly access the database
• you can modify the user interface relatively easily
• you have a lot of flexibility over what you do

Disadvantages of CRP:

• you have to be preapared to host your own server (do your own backups, etc.)
• you should be prepared to debug your own problems (there's no one to call)
• if your server is overloaded our out of space, you're on the hook

Advantages of CRP-sensys06:

Basically, adds a bunch of features that I felt were essential for highly-selective, single track conferences. Specifically:

• We document a typical "workflow" for a conference (what steps happen when). See Guide/index.html for this documentation. (I am standard CRP has almost no documentation about workflow.)
• we handle "suggested external reviewers": In a double-blind conference, this lets a PC member suggest an external reviewer that the PC chair can either accept or reject. This step is necessary because PC members don't know potential paper conflicts. (Standard CRP lacks this suggestion mechanism.)
• We handle PC member interests. PC members can select the topics they're interested in, allowing automated paper assignment.
• Adds automatic paper assignment using a simple bidding algorithm. (Standard CRP lacks and automatic assignment.)
• Adds a backup system to download papers from a static web server. (This is actually a bug work-around, since PHP download didn't work consistently from all browser :-( )
• Adds support for assigning "TCP Leads" to lead paper discussion. (No support in standard CRP.)
• Adds support for automatically assigning and manually modifying program order discussion. Includes support for DC-balanced discussion order. Editable from the web UI. (Standard CRP included several undocumented methods to automatically assign paper order, but non were DC-balanced, all seemed to run out-of-band only, and I couldn't actually figure any of them out.)
• Added graphs of scores to the hardcopy review summaries.
• Ported to PHP-5 (required to run on Fedora Core 4 without downgrading PHP). This port involved adding many many small changes to suppress warnings, and a couple of changes to actually fix things that broke.

Disadvantages of CRP-sensys06:

• it's only been used for Sensys 2006, so it's less "battle tested"
• I had a few problems I couldn't work around:
  • Paper downloading via PHP didn't work for some browsers (mostly IE). Work-around: I added support to link to papers at static URLs on a standard web server.
  • Some warnings still remain in the logs.
• The package likely has some security problems. I believe it is safe from non-logged in users, but the (much larger) set of interfaces exposed to logged-in users have not been fully audited. Please contact me out-of-band for more details.

Current release: crp-sensys06-20061206.tar.gz Wed Dec 6 11:20:27 PST 2006.

(Out-of-date releases: 20061204, 20061109, ).