Conference organising committee roles and responsibilities

Separate the organising and the scientific committee

The organising committee runs the event: venue, budget, registration, sponsors, communication. The scientific committee owns the science: topics, review and the programme. In small meetings the same people sit on both, but the responsibilities should still be written down separately.

Core roles

Adapt the names to your community. What matters is that each responsibility has one owner.

• Conference chair: overall accountability, final say on disputes, represents the meeting to the society and sponsors.
• Programme chair: leads the scientific committee, owns the call, the review process and the programme.
• Track or topic leads: recruit reviewers in their area and resolve borderline decisions.
• Treasurer or finance lead: budget, fee table, invoices, refunds.
• Secretariat: first contact for authors and attendees; keeps records of exceptions.
• Communications lead: website, email plan, social channels and attendee support.
• Local organiser: venue, catering, rooms, accessibility on site.
• Volunteer coordinator: on-site shifts and briefings.

Write a one-page responsibility table

For each task, name one person who decides and one who does. A short table beats a long charter: it can be read in a meeting and updated when someone leaves. Typical decisions to assign: accepting late submissions, granting fee waivers, moving an accepted talk to a poster, changing a room.

Plan for handover

Committees turn over, especially in societies that rotate the meeting. Keep decisions and exceptions in the same system as the records they concern so a new programme chair can see what was decided and why, instead of inheriting a mailbox.

A responsibility table you can copy

Fill in one row per task. “Decides” is the person with the final say; “does” is the person who carries it out. Where the same person does both, write it once. Where nobody is named, the task is not yet owned.

Task Decides Does Set dates and venue Conference chair Local organiser Approve the call for papers Programme chair Programme chair Recruit reviewers Track leads Secretariat Accept late submissions Programme chair Secretariat Set fees and waivers Treasurer Treasurer Move a talk to a poster Track lead Programme chair Publish and update the programme Programme chair Communications lead Answer attendee questions Communications Volunteers Approve sponsor benefits Conference chair Treasurer

How big should the committee be

Size follows workload, not prestige. A committee that is too large produces meetings without decisions; one that is too small burns out. As a guide, a small symposium works with four to six people; a society meeting needs eight to twelve, with separate lead roles; a large congress needs a core group of ten to fifteen plus a scientific committee and volunteers coordinated by named leads. Whatever the size, keep the group that makes decisions small, and treat the wider committee as advisers who are consulted at defined points.

Recruiting the scientific committee and setting expectations

Scientific committee members are usually senior people with little time. Ask them for specific things and give dates. Say how many abstracts they are expected to review, when the review period starts and ends, whether they will attend a decision meeting and whether their name appears on the website. Write these expectations in the invitation so that acceptance is informed, and follow up with a reminder timeline. People who know what is expected tend to stay, and people who are surprised by the workload resign midway.

• Number of abstracts to review and expected time per abstract.
• Review period dates and the decision meeting date.
• Conflict-of-interest policy and how to declare a conflict.
• Whether they may suggest additional reviewers.
• How their name and affiliation will be shown.

Volunteers, students and local helpers

On-site work depends on volunteers, and they need a defined structure just as much as the committee does. Assign one volunteer coordinator, publish a shift plan a few weeks before, and give each shift a written brief of what to do and whom to call. Students and early-career helpers often welcome the experience; recognise it with a certificate or a reduced fee where your rules allow. Do not ask volunteers to make decisions that belong to the committee, such as approving a fee waiver or changing a session. Give them a phone number to escalate to instead.

Keep a decision log

A decision log is the simplest handover tool. Each time the committee decides something that another person might later question, add one line. It takes a minute and saves an hour of searching mailboxes.

Date Decision Owner Reason 12 Feb Late submissions accepted until 20 March Programme chair Two invited authors missed the deadline 03 Apr Poster session moved to Wednesday afternoon Local organiser Foyer unavailable on Tuesday 21 May Student fee waiver limited to 15 places Treasurer Budget

What to do when someone leaves mid-cycle

Someone will fall ill, change jobs or simply become unavailable, usually at the worst moment. Prepare for it by naming a deputy for each critical role, for example a deputy programme chair who has access to the same records and has read the decision log. When a role becomes vacant, reassign the tasks immediately and tell everyone who is affected, including authors and reviewers if it touches them. Do not let a task drift because it is “nearly” somebody’s. If the departing person leaves notes, thank them and keep them with the handover file for the next edition.

Run committee meetings so they produce decisions

Most committee meetings fail because nobody prepared. Send the agenda and any documents three days before, with the decisions you need marked as decisions. Start with the open items from the decision log, then take the new ones in order of deadline rather than in order of interest. Give each item a time limit. End by reading back the decisions and owners aloud and send the minutes within a day, because a decision that is not written down will be remembered differently by everyone in the room. If a topic needs more than ten minutes and only concerns two people, take it out of the meeting and let them report back. Short meetings with a clear list of decisions keep senior volunteers engaged far better than long ones.

Meet on a rhythm

A monthly meeting early on and a weekly check-in in the last two months is usually enough. Each meeting should end with a list of decisions made and owners named, and that list should be visible to the whole committee.