NASA CoLab Conference Organizing
NASA CoLab Front Page
Website: NASA Colab
Client: NASA CoLab
Dates: May 2007 to September 2007
Scope: 80 developer days
Partners: Vernal Creative for wireframes and static design comps and Advomatic for clustered Drupal hosting
Description: NASA CoLab is a project of the Ames Research Center which brings together NASA’s engineers with the best and brightest of Silicon Valley. To this end, they hold regular meetings and conferences to help share ideas and expertise across disciplines, and to drive networking among aerospace professionals.
As one of the most creative, adventurous and entrepreneurial entities within the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, CoLab was eager to bring an online component to their real-world organizing. At a conference there is an enormous amount knowledge and “value” present in the audience that can’t be tapped in a typical presentation/discussion format because of the hard limits of space and time. This site aims at beginning to solve that problem.
The theory behind the CoLab site is that more of the value from a conference can be realized and retained by allowing participants to connect and share information both before and after the temporal event of a particular conference session. NASA CoLab also understoods that putting their work online would increase the transparency, “stickeyness” and viral reach of their activities.
Based on Chapter Three LLC’s experience building systems for community collaboration and networking, we won an open bidding process and landed the contract to execute this project for NASA. To fulfill the requirements, we used Drupal and a number of contributed modules in creating a scalable conference organizing website which can facilitate multiple events, track the activity and outcomes that occur, and keep the momentum going with post-conference working groups.
Features:
- Conference management: An admin interface that makes it easy for NASA to publish and manage separate web-pages for each conference. Conferences can be permission to be open or closed only to certain members.
- Registration system: The registration system supports customized registration forms, allows administrators to add registrants directly, and provides an excel compatible download of all registered participants.
- Member directory: Members can view and search a directory of all conference attendees that displays user pictures, names, titles and a link to their contact form.
- Schedule management system: The scheduling system supports multi-day multi-track conferences and allows users to signal their intent to attend a session directly on the schedule page through an AJAX interface with no page reload required.
- Session system: The session system handles both the rating of proposed sessions, as well as the data capture for sessions that make it onto the official conference schedule. Presenters can upload assets and attendees can collaboratively track links referenced during the session as well as edit a wiki-style notes page for sessions in which they participate.
- Working Groups: After a conference ends, sessions can spawn ongoing working groups for continued discussion and collaboration.
