Planning a conference? The Commons offers great tools to help with publicity, organization, and registration before your conference. And during the conference, your website and groups on the Commons serve as social hubs, where participants can meet and discuss issues, access information, post presentations, and aggregate tweets. Presentations can be live streamed on our CUNY.IS/LIVE page for those unable to attend in person. And once the conference is over, the social network you’ve created provides a way for people to stay connected and keep the conversation going, as well as a space to archive what went on.

Bronx Ed Tech Showcase

Lehman, Hostos and Bronx Community College use the Commons to host their annual Bronx EdTech Showcase. The site gathers proposals via online forms, posts agendas, showcases presentations, provides directions, and archives past conferences.

Getting Started

• Create a WordPress site on the Commons. Here you can centralize all information about your conference, publish agendas and presentations, advertise, and provide a place where members can blog and comment on other posts. You might want to select a theme with a slider that will showcase presentations and create a buzz.
• Optionally, create a group or a number of groups on the Commons. This can help with organization, provide an addition place for discussion, and launch a permanent space for like-minded colleagues to meet. Groups can provide a powerful social layer to your conference. Tools include discussion forums, announcement boards, file uploads, docs, email notifications, and reply by email functionality.
• If you have a group and a blog – consider attaching them for better integration. Learn more about groups and group blogs.
• If you think you’ll want to use our CUNY Live Streaming, contact Michael Branson Smith, the Outreach Coordinator of the CUNY Academic Commons, as soon as possible so we can schedule your conference and provide instructions.
• Optionally – get a “CUNY.IS/[yourSiteName]” quick link for your conference site or group (or both).
• Contact us to promote your conference and we will advertise it on the Commons home page slider.
• Optionally, use the Announcements group to Call For Proposals, and for publicity and reminders about your conference. See how the CUE Conference uses the Announcements group, below:

Map your Domain

Does your conference already have its own domain name? Or does your department or program have a place where events typically reside? No worrries. You can map that address to your site on the Commons. This provides a great way to take advantage of the great functionality available at the Commons while still maintaining a connection to your traditional domain. Users can either type in your domain’s URL or the Commons URL to access the conference site.

The CUNY Games Festival

Another great example of how the Commons can be used to host a conference, The CUNY Games Festival used its site to publish its program, recognize sponsors, archive presentations, link to live streaming, provide directions, food and lodging information, and a blog for reflections and wrap-ups. The Commons homepage had a slider promoting the festival, with links to the site and registration page.

WordPress Plugins

Once you have your conference site up and running, you’ll probably want to take advantage of some of the plugins we have running on the Commons. Here are a few ideas:

• Events Manager – This plugin lets you display and manage upcoming events (seminars, lectures, conferences, etc.). Widgets and shortcodes let you create interactive calendars of events or bulleted event listings. You can even let you readers make online reservations for events you are organizing.
• Google Maps Embed – quick way to add a map to your post or page. Great for showing your readers where an event or meeting will take place.
• Sociable/Share This – add social media buttons at the bottom of your posts and pages to make it easy for your readers to share links to your content
• Gravity Forms or Contact Forms 7 – if you need to collect information – these are great online form tools.
• Newsletter (aka MailPoet) – generate newsletters from your site’s posts and email them to participants.
• Rotating Tweets – set up a #hashtag for your conference and display what people are tweeting
• Anthologize – This plugin lets you craft an anthology of your posts, complete with a title page, table of contents, and chapters. You can even grab other posts via RSS feed. The final product can be exported to your computer as a pdf, or four other digital formats. Great for bundling up conference presentations.

Limitations – Non-Commons Members

The Commons is open to faculty, staff, graduate students, and graduate alums (we do make some exceptions and create some temporary accounts). If your conference audience does not fall into these categories, you can still use the Commons, but there are a couple limitations.

• Non-Commons members cannot join groups or use the forum. But they will have full view access as long as the group is public.
• Non-Commons members can view your conference’s public site and post comments on posts and pages, but they will not be able to subscribe and create posts.

Functionality Before, During and After a Conference

The Commons lets you create a free website for your conference, and offers a bunch of add-ons that may help both before, during, and after your event. Hope to see your event on the Commons!

The CUE Conference site has a post-conference wrap up page that summarizes the even, and aggregates snapshots and tweets.