ProgramChair handles the whole life of an academic conference, from submission and peer review through decisions, the program, and the proceedings, in one system. It was built to replace the software its author had spent fifteen-plus years fighting with, and the first societies have already committed their 2027 conferences to it.
This one was written by the person who has to run the conference.
The incumbents are development shops first. Their founders are engineers who studied the problem from outside it. They have never sat with a program chair three days before a conference, rebuilding a schedule by hand because two hundred acceptances landed in a spreadsheet that does not talk to the review system.
I have spent my career inside these systems: as an academic, as executive director of two international scholarly societies, and as the person responsible for more than eighty conferences around the world. I have used every major platform at every scale and in every failure mode, including at two in the morning on the night a submission deadline closes. ProgramChair is the culmination of that: not a general-purpose event platform bent toward academia, and not a developer's theory of how peer review ought to work, but the most complete system I can conceive of after fifteen-plus years of learning exactly what a conference needs and what it can do without.
Most societies run a conference across four or five disconnected tools and a great deal of spreadsheet work. ProgramChair follows the conference from the first call to the published proceedings, so the same author record, the same submission, and the same decision carry through to the program without being retyped.
Write your submission form and your review form field by field: session types, topics, word limits, scoring criteria. Nothing is visible to authors until you open the conference.
Authors create one account that follows them across every conference and year. They add co-authors, upload manuscripts, and edit their own proposals while submissions are open. Confirmations send themselves.
Match reviewers to proposals by topic, or let the system propose a balanced allocation. Reviewers see an anonymised version of the paper and nothing else. Reminders go out on a schedule you set.
Sort by score, by spread, or by the gap between reviewers, so contested papers surface instead of hiding. Send acceptances and rejections as a single run, then open that run to see exactly who received what, and resend to anyone whose mail bounced.
Drag accepted sessions into rooms and time slots on a grid. The system flags an author booked in two places at once and an accepted paper you have not placed. Publish a program attendees can read on a phone in a corridor.
Archive a finished conference and it leaves the front page but keeps working. Programs and proceedings hold their links, so citations and CV entries do not rot.
This one builds the draft program for you, then lets you argue with it.
Assembling a program is the hardest week of the conference year, and it is the part every other system leaves on your desk. You export the acceptances, open a spreadsheet, and start hand-fitting papers into rooms while checking that nobody is speaking in two places at once. ProgramChair does the first ninety percent in a few seconds, and leaves you the ten percent that actually needs your judgment.
Every session format gets its own rule. A workshop or symposium takes a room on its own. Research papers group into sessions of four or five. You set the papers per session, format by format, because a data blitz and a roundtable are not the same animal.
The scheduler groups thematically similar work, spreads sessions evenly across your slots instead of front-loading day one, mixes formats within each concurrent block, and keeps any one author out of two rooms at the same hour.
The draft opens on a grid of rooms by time slots. Drag a session from one cell to another, pull an unplaced paper out of the tray, swap two rooms. The grid is the editing surface, not a form that describes one.
A working slice of the real builder, staffed by the founders of the field. Drag a session into another room or hour, or drop it back in the tray, and watch the conflicts update. Click the small i on any session for its full record. On a phone, tap a session and then tap where it should go. Nothing here is saved.
H. G. Wells is booked into two rooms at nine o'clock. Move one of his sessions to an empty cell and the clash clears. Put it in the eleven o'clock slot instead and you will see the softer warning the real scheduler raises for back to back appearances.
This is one slice. Open the full demo to walk through submission, review, decisions, and the program end to end, with nothing saved.
Papers are clustered by what they share. A common topic counts double a common keyword, and each group's profile grows as papers join it, so a session coheres around a theme rather than around whatever sorted next.
Build the day out of fourteen kinds of slot: sessions, keynotes, meals, breaks, receptions, business meetings, awards, excursions. The scheduler fills only the session slots and leaves your lunch alone.
Nobody is scheduled against themselves. The builder also tries to keep the same person off back-to-back slots and out of repeat appearances on a single day.
Sessions are dealt across the available slots in balanced passes, so you do not end up with five concurrent sessions on Thursday morning and one on Friday afternoon.
Each review criterion can apply to every session format or only to the ones you choose, so a roundtable proposal is judged on the questions that matter for a roundtable and a research paper on the ones that matter for a paper. One review form, correctly shaped for each thing in it.
Scale criteria carry weights you set, and the overall score is their weighted composite. Rigour of method can count for more than clarity of writing if that is the call your society wants to make.
The society running a conference usually has a volunteer board, a program chair who changes every year, no technical staff, and a budget that cannot absorb enterprise software or the consultant who comes with it. That is the organisation ProgramChair is built for, and it shapes every decision underneath it.
There is no server to buy, patch, back up, or scale. Your submission deadline can bring four hundred people to the site in the same hour and there is nothing on your side that can fall over. No database to administer, no command line, no technician on call, and no infrastructure line item to defend to the board.
Academic committees rotate, so the system has to be learnable in an afternoon by whoever inherits it. The program grid is the thing you drag. The review form is the thing you fill in. Nothing important hides behind a settings page you need a manual to find.
The whole application is a single file, so it opens quickly on venue wifi that was never designed for four hundred simultaneous devices. Attendees read the program between sessions on whatever is in their pocket, and reviewers work on tablets. Every screen was built for that first rather than adapted to it afterwards.
Submission, review, decisions, program and proceedings are all included. There is no separate licence for single sign-on, no charge to remove someone else's branding, and no storage tier to outgrow.
Every message the system sends is logged and grouped by mailing. Open a run to see each recipient, whether it was delivered, and the exact email they received, then resend to the ones that failed.
Download a complete backup of a conference (submissions, reviews, roster, program) as a single file, any time, in a format you can read. Restore it yourself. Nothing is held hostage.
The judgment behind ProgramChair took fifteen-plus years to accumulate. The software itself is new, and we would rather say that plainly than imply a track record it has not earned yet. These are the conferences that will run on it first. Two societies have put their 2027 seasons on a system built by the person who runs both of them, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on your temperament.
The software is free to use. You pay a small amount per registrant, and nothing else. There is no licence to buy, no seat count to commit to, and no annual platform fee waiting for you whether your conference fills or not. If an uncontrollable year shrinks your attendance, your cost shrinks with it. Your budget rises and falls with your own success, never against it.
A venue falls through, a flight ban lands, a funding body pulls out, numbers come in soft. None of that leaves you owing for software you could not use. You are never underwater on a fee you signed before you knew how the year would go.
A strong year costs a little more because it earned more. A quiet year costs almost nothing. The expense tracks the thing that pays for it, the people who actually registered, so it is always a line your board can defend.
Every stage of the lifecycle and every feature is included at the same rate. No module is locked behind a higher tier, no charge to remove someone else's branding, no storage plan to outgrow.
Runs on your own site and sends through your own mail. The leanest option, and the lowest rate, because the sending reputation and hosting stay yours.
We run and maintain it for you, with mail handled on our infrastructure. A dollar or two more per registrant, and nothing for you to set up or keep running.
The per-registrant rate is set with each society, kept deliberately small, and always sized to sit inside a registration fee without being felt. No setup fee. No annual minimum. Talk to us and we will put a number to your year.
If your society is running a conference on OpenConf, EasyChair, or a folder of spreadsheets, it is worth a conversation. Tell us roughly how many submissions you handle and when your call opens, and we will tell you honestly whether this is a good fit.
Start a conversation→ProgramChair is developed by Dr. Brandon Charpied, Executive Director of MOBTS and the IACM.