feature request: support for virtual meetings

[fdouglis]

Hi @kohler, we just finished our second virtual PC meeting for our conference, and first of all thanks once again for providing such a great tool!

We realize there are a couple of things that would be very useful for zoom PC meetings where not everyone is online at the same time due to conflicts.

1. We collected conflicts and tried to manually assign discuss orders to match those conflicts, but it was a bit painful. If the auto-assignment could take not only conflicts of PC members but blocks of time when people are available, it could say do papers A,B,C in the first half hour, then D, E, F, and so on.
2. People wouldn't necessarily be paying close attention when we shifted papers to one they had reviewed. Even in a f2f meeting, but especially an online one, it would be nice to have the tracker highlight ones that someone has reviewed and point out the upcoming interesting paper even if the tab for HotCRP isn't in the foreground. So, a pop-up, beep, or something to get their attention when a paper is on-deck and again when it comes up. Perhaps something like this already exists and people just weren't noticing.

I realize point (1) is non trivial, so i'm not holding my breath, but I thought it worth putting on the table here for you or anyone else who might feel like trying to support it. (As I've said, apparently in the wrong "tone," sorry -- I don't know PHP so I don't see myself trying to extend it.)

[emeryberger]

We ran ASPLOS 2021 virtually and two my grad students wrote scripts to manage this process, which went quite smoothly. We specifically focused on scheduling papers around people's availability. See https://github.com/emeryberger/PC-resources and https://github.com/emeryberger/PC-Resources/tree/master/PC-meeting-scripts.

[fdouglis]

Awesome, @emeryberger !! Thanks. I wonder if these could be integrated into HotCRP somehow. It sounds like right now you download certain files from HotCRP and then run offline, which of course is fine, but even better inside HotCRP ...