Frab – free and open conference management system

[xvilka]

There is also Pretalx[1][2].

[1] https://pretalx.org

[2] https://github.com/pretalx

[sdan]

Not sure if it's just me:

Anytime you show a product at least include some screenshots of how it looks like somewhere. In my brief search, I couldn't find anything.

[ziari]

I found some in the GitHub wiki (last edited in 2013, though).

https://github.com/frab/frab/wiki/Screenshots

[weinzierl]

I agree about the screenshots and a demo in addition is even better. Or even better yet: real world use cases. To see frab live and in action google for "ccc fahrplan" For example, last year's congress "fahrplan" is:

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/timeli...

"fahrplan" is running frab since 2013.

[jedimastert]

Is this more geared towards educational/business conferences (where the primary motivation is speakers disseminating information to large groups of people) can it do more entertainment conferences or fan cons with booths and a show floor and the like?

Edit: I just realized that I meant to say "conventions" for the second part, and also that there's a lot more crossover than I would have originally thought.

[artemist]

I believe it is more focused on educational conferences. the CCC uses this for all its conferences, including Congress and Camp.

[jph]

Thank you for writing and sharing - I especially like the feature for a call for papers.

I'm adding Frab to a list of Meetup alternatives and related meeting software:

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/social_network_plan/b...

[Quanttek]

Pretalx was also mentioned in the comments

[davidroetzel]

It is so nice to see this on here. I started frab way back for FrOSCon, a german free and open source software conference (which you should totally attend if you can make it!).

I stopped contributing when I stopped organizing FrOSCon, but thankfully Mario, the current maintainer, has picked it up and he does a tremendous job ever since. Also a big thank you to all contributors.

[dbrgn]

This system is regularly used by the German CCC to organize their conferences.

[hirundo]

From Frab's schema.rb:

  create_table "people", force: :cascade do |t|
    # ...
    t.string "first_name", limit: 255, default: ""
    t.string "last_name", limit: 255, default: ""
    t.string "gender", limit: 255
    # ...
  end

Our schema has a similar table, but with "prefix" instead of "gender", where on the front end a list pops down with Mr., Ms., etc. We just use the prefix to form the full name.

I wonder where the need to track gender comes from in such an app. We manage events and conferences too, but gender hasn't come up beyond the salutation. Since they do care about gender maybe they will soon also want pronoun and possessive_pronoun columns.

[vharuck]

The "first name, last name" fields are worse, IMO.

- It doesn't apply for many cultures.

- The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third-party data.

- They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How would you like to be addressed?"

[nisuni]

Some conferences are in locations with restricted accommodation facilities, and if you don’t specify a roommate, you are paired with someone of your gender.

So that’s why the gender might be needed.

As far as the preferred pronouns are concerned, I see them as something with heavy political connotations. No one who is not hard left believes in the necessity of the xir pronoun, and of course there are trans people also among the right!

So, to me it’s completely acceptable that something so controversial is not included.

[fefe23]

The gender field was added for FrosCon. They used it to select what kind of t-shirt you want.

Other uses have been to suggest shared sleeping arrangements.

[dbrgn]

The gender _might_ be used to ensure diverse speaker selection.

[ggm]

Anyone reviewed how it compares to indico or eventbirght?

[fnord123]

Or easy chair: https://www.easychair.org/

[agumonkey]

doo people have open source recording gig ? to ensure nice sound and synced slides ?

[markvdb]

Have a look at what we use at https://fosdem.org [0][1]. In terms of software, a crucial component is voctomix [2], using it as a headless video mixer. Another invaluable component is nginx-rtmp [3] for streaming.

We made a heavy push to get all of this packaged in Debian. It's a surprisingly powerful combination.

[0] https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible... [1] https://github.com/FOSDEM/video/blob/master/instructions/FOS... [2] https://github.com/voc/voctomix [3] https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module/