Since the dawn of email, its main shortcoming has been that it’s rarely concise or categorizable. Naturally, this poses a considerable challenge when coordinating conferences in which minute detail and adherence to regulations are of utmost importance for a successful outcome. This issue is primarily a consequence of a few ways one can immediately obtain all their required information from a quick scan of an email.
Shortcomings of email correspondence for abstract management
Submitting proposals over email is another roadblock to the smooth running of research conferences. Often the candidate/researchers will not be aware of the criteria their proposal must meet, leading to frustrating confusion, delayals, and unnecessarily increased workload.
A possible solution to this common problem is to inform all potential participants of the expected due dates, word counts, etc. However, adherence to these guidelines is challenging to track, considering the sheer volume of emails involved. There is also the added step of forwarding the email contents to prospective reviewers for reviewal. In turn, these reviews would be submitted by email. Thus manual pairing of reviews to the proposal would be necessary. As expected, an email-based correspondence platform for a conference would require considerable admin and extra hours of work/maintenance.
