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Call for speakers ​

The Speaker Hub runs your call for papers from the first submission to the accepted speaker: speakers submit through a portal, reviewers score what they are assigned, track chairs recommend, and you decide. Open the event and choose Speaker Hub.

Set up the call ​

On the Overview tab, open the call's settings and fill in:

  • Title of the call, and Instructions — shown at the top of the speaker portal: what you are looking for, how long talks are, when speakers will hear back.
  • Submissions open and Submissions close — the window in which the portal accepts proposals.
  • Decisions by and Slides due — the dates you commit to. Decisions cannot be due before submissions close, and slides cannot be due before decisions.
  • Extra questions — anything beyond the title, abstract and speaker details, as Short text, Long text, Choose one (one choice per line, e.g. talk lengths) or Yes / no.

Saving keeps the call as a draft: anyone following the portal link is turned away until you choose Open the call. Close it again with Save & close the call, and reopen it the same way if you extend the deadline.

Share the portal ​

Under Where speakers submit, copy the portal link and share it wherever you announce the call. You can also add a Call for speakers section to the event website, with a submit button that goes to the same portal.

Speakers can come back to the portal to check their status and update their submission, and — once accepted — upload their slides.

Invite reviewers ​

On the Reviewers tab, enter a reviewer's email and choose Send invitation. They accept from the email (or from an invite link you copy) and sign in with an ordinary BagEvent account. Resend invite is there if the email went astray.

Then assign reviewers to proposals from the Proposals tab. A reviewer's page lists only the proposals assigned to them. For each one they give:

  • a Score from 0 to 10 — optional, if they only want to recommend;
  • a recommendation — Accept, Maybe, Revise or Reject;
  • Comments for the chair and the organizer. The submitter never sees them.

Track chairs ​

Tracks are listed under Available tracks, and each can have a chair; the same tracks colour the agenda. A chair opens Chair review, sees the proposals in the tracks they chair with the reviewers' scores, and saves a Recommendation with a Note to the organizer. That gives you a shortlist per track instead of a single pile.

Decide ​

Open a proposal on the Proposals tab to see the abstract, the answers, the reviews and the chair's recommendation, then choose:

  • Accept — the speaker record is created from what they submitted, so nothing is typed twice, and the speaker is emailed. Tick Schedule an agenda session on accept to create their session at the same time, with a day, room, start and end; clashes with the same room or the same speaker are shown before you confirm. Leave it off to place the session under Agenda later.
  • Revise — asks the speaker to rework the proposal.
  • Reject — the speaker is told it was not selected.

Each of the three decisions is emailed to the submitter; write a Message to the submitter to add your own words. If a proposal has no email address on file, nobody is notified.

A proposal moves through Pending assignment, In review, and then Accepted or Not selected; a speaker can also withdraw. Everyone you accept stays in your organization's speaker library, so inviting them to next year's event does not mean re-entering their details.

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