WABI Conference Program Committee Checklist

- get in contact with OC chairs: conference date, who takes care of web pages,
  number of keynotes

- identify and invite keynote speaker(s): 1 in case of ALGO or ACM-BCB, more if
  the conference is organised stand-alone

- set up EasyChair account

- recruit a PC with sufficiently many members to keep the load to
  about 6 papers per person, with 3 reviews per paper. EasyChair supports this.

- contact LIPICS (http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/lipics)
  to reconfirm that there will again be a proceedings volume and get their
  deadline for uploading the final copy, a date from which you can work
  various dates (submission, notification, final version) backwards.

- prepare a CFP file for distribution over mailing lists and
  one for the web page

- advertise widely (PC, OC, SC), mention it everywhere, push friends,
  colleagues, students, and chance acquaintances to submit.
  Some mailing lists:
  * CPM-SPIRE: cpm-spire-l@lists.cs.ucr.edu
  * DMAnet: DMANET@zpr.uni-koeln.de
  * SocBiN: socbin@sbc.su.se
  * Bioinformatik.de: bioinformatik.de@lists.lrz.de

- organise reviewing, including a lively PC discussion
  of borderline submissions

  Note 1: When organising reviewers, endeavor to point out to them that they
  should ideally review the paper themselves, and if they call for a subreviewer
  it is expected that they check the review carefully. This should be pointed
  out in the reviewer assignment email, and on other occasions if appropriate.

  Note 2: WABI has a COI policy, downloadable from the Wiki page, see footer.

- organise poster submission and reviewing (by PC chairs only).
  Advertise Call for Posters widely, see CFP above. In addition, send it to
  all authors of submitted papers.
  Invite authors of accepted papers to also bring a poster about their work,
  to encourage further discussion after the talk. Consider making this
  mandatory for all paper authors.

- set up program and upload to web page

- in the program leave space for a "Business Meeting", potentially under a
  less scary name e.g. "Future WABIs - Your inputs". Encourage SC members to
  attend and run the meeting. If not, PC-chairs should also be able to do it
  and send feedback to the SC by email afterwards.

- invite best papers (usually better 50%) for journal versions.
  Usually Algorithms for Molecular Biology (AMB) has an interesting offer:
  open access "Thematic Series" with several vouchers for authors from
  institutions that are not BMC members.
  Details can be obtained from the AMB chief editors (Burkhard Morgenstern,
  Peter Stadler).

- organise reviewing of journal versions (good chance to recruit the
  conference reviewers again)

- give feedback to SC, including how to improve this checklist

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For more information, see http://gi.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/wabi