Google Docs success story

As a member of the organizing committee of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD 2008), I spent some time (and still do as of today) in updating the conference's website (the original pages were created by the National University of Ireland, Galway for ISD2007, and we were granted the right to reuse them).

During this exercise, I found that Google Docs, and especially the spreadsheet application is extremely useful. For instance, while the authors were registering and submitting the camera-ready version of their papers, we used a dynamically updated spreadsheet to indicate the status of their paper.

Furthermore, while filling in the slots for session chairs and forming the program, we used another dynamically updated page which indicated which slots were empty. This page was updated in almost real time, as we edited the spreadsheet as soon as we handled the incoming emails and then the corresponding web-page was updated within minutes.

Finally, an important aspect of each conference is the publication of its statistics. In this regard, Google spreadsheets really rocks, not only because it allows to publish information dynamically, but also because it allows the creation of graphs which are also dynamically updated along with their associated data. For instance, we were able to publish a graph with information about the number of submitted papers per track, along with their acceptance ratio. Furthermore, using the nice gadgets available in the web application, we were also able to publish a map that illustrates the origin of the (affiliation of the) authors of accepted papers and the program committee.

Evidently, although an excellent tool, Google Docs is not perfect yet. One limitation I found is that I could not insert isolated fields of information in my web-pages (i.e., corresponding to a single cell). For instance, in one of the spreadsheets, I maintain information like the total number of accepted papers (which changes as some authors withdraw theirs). Unfortunately, that number had to be hard-coded in HTML, because I could not find a way to insert isolated (but dynamically updated) fields in my page. I understand that this can be solved with a custom gadget (if not done already), but of course it would be nice if it was provided as a standard gadget.

Although not perfect yet, Google Docs have really helped us with the organization of the conference, and I think this is something worth mentioning. As I really did not want to deal with anything but static HTML pages, Google Docs has proved to be an extremely useful tool.