PC-Nomination-Tool

This repository hosts a Django project that implements a programme committee (PC) nomination tool. This website allows users to nominate PC members, checking in the background that the nominated individuals have not already been nominated, so as to avoid the usual overhead of finding duplicates in long lists of nominations.

The tool was originally developed for ECAI-2024, the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, where it was successfully used to assemble a list of over 5,000 nominees.

Presentation of the Tool

Nominating Potential PC Members

This tool is used to nominate PC members. After entering their name, users arrive at this page:

Using this form, users can enter the details of a person. These are matched against the database in the background, warning the user if they are potentially entering the details of someone who has already been nominated.

The identity of a person is linked to their DBLP page URL (as the other details need not be unique). When entering the name of someone, the DBLP API is queried to suggest pre-filled information:

Administrating the Nominations

On the page manage, several admin tools are proposed.

• You can import nominations as a CSV file.
• You can export the nomination database as a CSV file.
• You can check whether there are potential duplicates: database entries representing the same person but with different email addresses.
• You can explore in a big table with all nominated individuals.

This page is only accessible to users that are logged in via Django. You typically only want admins to have a Django account for this project.

Development/Deployment

This project is ready to be deployed on a server by anyone who has basic knowledge of how to deploy Django applications. In the following we present few steps to get started.

Local Settings

A local setting file confutils\local_settings.py is required for the website to work. It should look like this:

import os

# Build paths inside the project like this: os.path.join(BASE_DIR, ...)
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

# SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret! And update this fake one!
SECRET_KEY = 'secret'

# SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
DEBUG = True

# For production, update with the actual URL host
# ALLOWED_HOSTS = [""]

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'confutils.db'),
    },
}

STATIC_ROOT = "static/"

FILE_UPLOAD_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE = 40 * 1024 * 1024

Python Setup

Next, install the required python libraries. Additional libraries may be needed depending on your database engine.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Database Setup

To create the databases, run the following commands:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py initialise_db

Super Admin

Create a super admin to have access to the admin pages:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Serve the Website Locally

To serve the website on your local machine run:

python manage.py runserver

Server Deployment

Follow any good Django deployment tutorial to deploy this project on a server.