Frenzy

Abstract

Organizing conference sessions around themes improves the experience for attendees. However, the session creation process can be difficult and time-consuming due to the amount of expertise and effort required to consider alternative paper groupings. We present a collaborative web application called Frenzy to draw on the efforts and knowledge of an entire program committee. Frenzy comprises (a) interfaces to support large numbers of experts working collectively to create sessions, and (b) a two-stage process that decomposes the session-creation problem into meta-data elicitation and global constraint satisfaction. Meta-data elicitation involves a large group of experts working simultaneously, while global constraint satisfaction involves a smaller group that uses the meta-data to form sessions.We evaluated Frenzy with 48 people during a deployment at the CSCW 2014 program committee meeting. The session making process was much faster than the traditional process, taking 88 minutes instead of a full day. We found that meta-data elicitation was useful for session creation. Moreover, the sessions created by Frenzy were the basis of the CSCW 2014 schedule.

Putting the Pieces Back Together Again: Contest Webs for Large-Scale Problem Solving

“…A number of recent efforts in the CSCW community have focused on how to combine individual contributions to achieve larger goals. For instance, several projects have emphasized developing automated tools to help manage global constraints that are specific to situations such as travel itinerary planning [50], conference scheduling [8,22], and taxonomy development [9]. Unlike these systems, the work we describe here relies primarily on humans to manage global constraints.…”

“…By exploring many alternatives in parallel, while still reusing previous work as much as possible, the contest web approach may be especially useful for problems that are very important (where extensive effort is justified), very urgent (where parallel efforts may be critical), and/or very controversial (where working in a single group may be difficult). Finally, the contest web approach can be used even in situations where domain-specific automated tools (e.g., [8,9,22,50]) are not available.…”

Putting the Pieces Back Together Again

“…A number of recent efforts in the CSCW community have focused on how to combine individual contributions to achieve larger goals. For instance, several projects have emphasized developing automated tools to help manage global constraints that are specific to situations such as travel itinerary planning [50], conference scheduling [8,22], and taxonomy development [9]. Unlike these systems, the work we describe here relies primarily on humans to manage global constraints.…”

“…By exploring many alternatives in parallel, while still reusing previous work as much as possible, the contest web approach may be especially useful for problems that are very important (where extensive effort is justified), very urgent (where parallel efforts may be critical), and/or very controversial (where working in a single group may be difficult). Finally, the contest web approach can be used even in situations where domain-specific automated tools (e.g., [8,9,22,50]) are not available.…”