MiniConf -- A Virtual Conference Framework
This addresses the need for virtual conference solutions for academic communities, but it is incremental as it builds on existing virtual event concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of hosting virtual academic conferences by developing MiniConf, a framework designed to be global, asynchronous, interactive, and sustainable, resulting in an open-source system that is easy to set up and scalable on minimal hardware.
MiniConf is a framework for hosting virtual academic conferences motivated by the sudden inability for these events to be hosted globally. The framework is designed to be global and asynchronous, interactive, and to promote browsing and discovery. We developed the system to be sustainable and maintainable, in particular ensuring that it is open-source, easy to setup, and scalable on minimal hardware. In this technical report, we discuss design decisions, provide technical detail, and show examples of a case study deployment.