Who Created This Web Site?

The FLoC 2006 Web pages and program booklet were created in a unique way by over 2000 people and a computer program.

The idea of computer-generated Web pages originated from the excellent FLoC 2002 Web page design by Henning Makholm at the University of Copenhagen. In 2002 the program and some other information were generated by a program specially written in ML using data collected by program chairs. Henning and program chairs communicated by email. In 2002 I was one of the program chairs and remember too well how time-consuming the whole procedure was for program chairs (not counting full-time work by Henning), though the result was an outstanding collection of Web pages of an unprecedented information quality.

In 2006 the whole collection of Web pages was generated by the conference system EasyChair, previously used for program committee management. However, the idea of the 2002 Web pages was taken much further in several respects.

First, all program chairs were asked to use EasyChair as the submission system. As a result, information about FLoC submissions and their authors was no more collected by program chairs but instead supplied by the authors themselves thus reducing the burden on program chairs. Second, the collection and processing of data from program chairs, program committee members, authors, and even generation of uniformly-looking Web pages was organized through EasyChair.

A special extension of EasyChair was implemented to automate all aspects of this work including the following.

• Collecting relevant data from the the EasyChair conference and workshop data.
• Access and visual interface for FLoC Web managers for managing the Web pages and program-related data.
• Email to program chairs, PC members, and authors.
• Generation of program from the EasyChair conference and workshop data and additional information provided by program chairs.
• Template-based creation of uniformly-looking Web pages in which some template parameters are provided by program chairs and some generated by EasyChair.
• Generation of a draft of the conference program booklet.
• A Wiki eventually containing explanation on how to write conference programs, upload files and use templates.

The idea of using EasyChair for this work was born at a FLoC organizing committee meeting of the Software Reliability Research group at Microsoft Research.

To give you an idea of the scale of FLoC and the number of people involved in the collaborative work on the FLoC program we cite the statistics generated by EasyChair. At the time of writing this article the FLoC database stores information about

• 6 conferences;
• 41 workshops;
• 92 PC chairs;
• 555 PC members;
• 2436 people;
• 1195 submissions with 2703 authors.