I should organize a series of conferences in the next few months.
I have no knowledge of dedicated Conference Management Systems (such as Openconf), so I would be willing to use Moodle for that. However, while I am sure that in that way I would spare a lot of time/hassle, not having to learn yet another environment, I don't have any idea of what (if anything) I would be missing.
What are the main advantages of using a dedicated Conference Management System (such as Openconf) as compared to Moodle fot this kind of activities?
thanks,
Piersante
There are huge labor intensive activities that Moodle is not automated to do. I have fascilited and organized numerous teacher conferences and we do it all manually except for steering committee coordination via Moodle forums. If you had $5000, you could make a decent Moodle conference management module that processes submissions, makes schedules, provides interactive pre and post conference forums. We are even experimenting with a real-time evaluation/ratings system in Moodle via mobile phones (just one piece of the puzzle).
Don - Are you bidding on the job? I have been asked to look into an open source solution. OpenConf did not seem to be what we were looking for. I know there was talk of doing this with choice. I suspect that once we get to roles in Moodle 1.7 we might be able to do something more fancy with it. In any case, I was just curious if you know of any other open source projects for scheduling parent/teacher conference. Peace.
Hi, would be easier to help, if you describe WHAT such a system should do, we use Openconf - but without problems .... and we used moodle to organize conferences like Dan without problems ....
Peter
I'm looking for a way for parents of students to go in and setup a ten minute parent/teacher conference with a teacher of their child. Currently parents call in and request a conference and then volunteers manually do the scheduling. It would be nice if the parents could sign up online for a time.
use the schedule modul from Gustav Delius (Activity Moduls).
Because useres have to sign on, make a course with the children as members and there you use this modul for signing up.
This is the way i organise my consultation hours
Peter
Is COMAS on your list of options? http://wiki.consol.org.mx/comas -- even though the page seems to imply it's unfinished, it's been used to organise quite a few FOSS conferences I've been to. Maybe because Gunnar Wolf was involved in all of them 
But, then again, you can always invite him to your conf, he's a great guy!
OTOH, I agree with Don that if you can narrow down the bits you think are missing, and put some effort and/or money behind that, Moodle can be made to help conference organising quite a bit.
We've used it for MoodleMootNZ and it's worked well for the registration handling and social parts; and yet probably a few things could be tweaked here and there.
But, then again, you can always invite him to your conf, he's a great guy!
OTOH, I agree with Don that if you can narrow down the bits you think are missing, and put some effort and/or money behind that, Moodle can be made to help conference organising quite a bit.
We've used it for MoodleMootNZ and it's worked well for the registration handling and social parts; and yet probably a few things could be tweaked here and there.
I will check it out. Thanks for the lead.