Website Chair

Recommendations from a 2021/2022 Website Chair

Duties

Website chairs are responsible for building the conference website and post calls for papers, conference schedules, announcements, and other information on the website.

Since the content on our conference websites is generally static, GitHub Pages rendered using Jekyll is the usual hosting option. The code for the website should be made public under an open-source license so that it can be reused by future conferences.

General Timeline

  • Set up a new conference website. Fork the repository from a previous year (e.g., ACL 2017, NAACL 2022) and follow the instructions in README. Then ask the ACL Information Director regarding how to set up a custom domain name (like “202x.naacl.org”).

  • Update general information about the conference, including the location, important dates, and organization committees.

  • Tell other chairs to either email you or submit a pull request when they want to post something on the website. The following list shows all of the pieces of information contained on the website and which conference chair it came from:

  • Organizing Committee: General Chair

  • Call for Papers: Program Chairs

  • Call for Demos: Demo Chairs

  • List of Workshops: Workshop Chairs and Workshop Organizers

  • List of Tutorials and Descriptions: Tutorial Chairs

  • Sponsors: the ACL Office

  • Social Event and Conference Venue Information: the ACL Office, Local Organization Chairs, and Social Chairs

  • Conference Program and Presentation Info: Program Chairs

  • Hotel Venues and Reservations Forms: the ACL Office

  • Visa Letter Information: the ACL Office

  • Before the conference, add static pages or blog posts from other chairs.

  • During the conference, post any urgent announcements on the front page.

  • Establish Social Media section showing all tweets with the corresponding conference hashtag and from the official twitter account, and a communal photo album.

General consideration:

  • There are two ways to post information: as a static page or as a blog post. Some conferences made heavy use of the blog while some did not have a blog at all. Choose the one most suitable for the conference.
  • Google is blocked in some countries, so prefer alternatives such as Microsoft Forms.
  • Most people use the website on mobile data, so try to compress multimedia contents such as images.
  • There is an automated schedule page generation system (example from NAACL 2022) written by Nitin Madnani. The system allows selecting events and generating a PDF based on them. Feel free to adapt it.

Note: Website chairs used to be responsible for a conference app, but this was obsoleted by the virtual conference system, namely Underline and Gather.town, which are not handled by Website chairs. Please confirm the responsibility with the General Chair.