Awareness Support in Scientific Event Management with ginkgo

The management of scientific events is a prestigious job that goes together with many tasks that have to be carried out in a timely and highly parallel fashion. Conference management systems (CMSs) have simplified the process and have given decision-support features to the organizers but still there is room for improvements. With the social media movement of the last decade, computer-mediated social interactions and professional networking have also gained importance for scholars. Those interactions take place outside of CMSs. Thus, a rich source of information is ceded to social networking services that could be used for a better quality of service and more awareness support for all stakeholders in CMSs. In this paper we introduce ginkgo as a novel approach to scientific event management that brings together well-known features of classic CMSs with those of common features of social networking sites to make scientific event management more social and awareness supporting.