CONGO: Conference Management Software

The CONGO^TM system is an easy-to-use, scalable, customizable registration management system. CONGO was designed by veteran convention planners with the real-world needs of the meetings professional in mind. CONGO coordinates online registration, reservations, booking, and scheduling functions, and offers a unique suite of at-event service features designed to reduce expenses, and enhance the attendee experience.

Highlights include:

• Registrant database
  Fully browseable, searchable, and editable. Contains all contact information for the registrant and can be customized to incorporate other fields as desired.
• Registrant 'properties' management
  Keep track of basic registration as well as registrant properties and privileges (Speaker / Staff / Function, etc)
• Full Registrant history
  Keeps track of all activity across multiple conventions and events. Sortable and searchable for data mining purposes, while retaining privacy of each individual events' data.
• Registration Point of Sale
  Fast registrant processing for day-of-event operations, such as badge printing, registrant maintenance, collection / validation of event fees (link to back end credit card authorization system), etc.
• Published API for External Access
  CONGO sports a fully documented API that allows event staff to write client applications to communicate with the CONGO internal data and functions.

Bundled Components

• Application Server
  CONGO includes a fully documented standalone appserver which handles all internal business functions for CONGO. The user need never work directly with the supporting database, since the appserver manages all functionality needed to run an event. The appserver is available for any client to connect to (with appropriate authenticatioin), via a fully documented API
• 'Coconut' web client
  One way to access CONGO is via a web browser. The Coconut web client, bundled with CONGO, allows full access to all of CONGO's functionality via a standard web browser. The interface is designed to be fast, easy to navigate, and browser agnostic.

The Latest News about CONGO...

CONGO status. Some meaningless statistics

Work continues on CONGO v2. In a slight fit of whimsy, after spending a week getting PayPal integration working (PayPal Sandbox is an awesome idea, and is very helpful - but has it's drawbacks - a topic for another post) - I was curious how much code I had actually written into the new version.

CONGO v1 - the code that Arisia and other events use:

Total Lines of Code : 37,818 :
Java: 24,982
PHP: 12,630
XML: 193

CONGO v2 - the rewrite that I'm working on now. This shares almost no code from the original version. I'm at about 90% functionality compared to v1, but I've also added many features that aren't in the v1 code at all (such as a fully working public interface) :

Total Lines of Code : 21,221 :
Java: 15,805
JSP: 3,302
XML: 2,114

And work continues. I'm closing bugs almost as fast as I'm opening them, but at least the list is getting down to "here's what needs to be fixed or cleaned up", as opposed to "write this entire subsystem." Mostly.

CONGO - An update

A few folks have contacted us and asked what's going on with CONGO. It's been over a year since an update has been posted, is the product still viable?

The short answer is, yes indeedy! The radio silence on the site has been due to several factors.

The first is that the company website is in the process of being rewritten to allow better community support. The new site will have forums, protected upload and download editors, and other tools. Look for an update within the next few months!

The second, and probably more important bit is that since around the middle of July 2008, we have been working on a complete rewrite of CONGO. Our original design was very successful, handling hundreds of thousands of registrations over more than 50 events, but there were design changes necessary that could only be implemented with a major architecture overhaul.

Progress on CONGO v2 is proceeding apace. Dave's personal blog has several postings on how the rewrite is going. If you're interested in seeing how things are progressing, that is the place to watch.

So, yes, we're still here, yes, CONGO is still around, and we're still doing events, but stay tuned for a vastly improved and more flexible system in CONGO v2.

Coconut screenshots available.

A lot of work has been going on with the Coconut web client for CONGO, so here's a peek into what the system looks like. Check out the screenshots and descriptions.

AnimeBoston benefits from CONGO

April 9-11, 2004 - AnimeBoston, New England's largest Anime convention, concluded with a successful deployment of CONGO. During the 3 1/2 day event, CONGO registered over 3300 people, printing badges and allowing them into the event with no more than a 20 minute wait. This event saw the deployment of the new load-balanced printer solution, which allowed multiple badge printers to run simultaneously, allowing immediate failover in case of badge outages, ribbon changes, or mechanical failure.