The fifth MISTA conference (www.mistaconference.org) has just taken place in Arizona. The web site, I think looks pretty good but there is a lot more that I would like to do with it. For example, I should have all the papers available for download and, over the next few months, I am going to put in the effort required to make them all available. I guess that there will be at least 500 of them (including abstracts) which, I believe, is a useful resource for the scheduling community.
But, when I do make them available I would like to do a few things:
- I would like to know how many times a paper is being downloaded. This is useful information for the authors as well as for the MISTA organisers.
- I would like to collect email addresses as potential conference delegates. I know that people may not like this sort of thing but as long as we are up front about it and, in any case, they are getting the paper for free.
So, for a few days now, I have been sketching out a few ideas as to how I could get this to work. I think I would have the same look/feel as my own publications (see http://graham-kendall.com/publications/index.php?type=all) where I list my publications but, for each one, you can go to another page and see all the details about that paper; including being able to download it.
The difference with the MISTA web site would be the fact that when you wanted to download a paper a couple of things would happen. Firstly you would be asked for your email address (and perhaps name and company/institution – but that might be a bit much). It would also say that they would be email’ed about future MISTA conferences and obtaining the paper says that they agree with this. Once you had entered all the required information, you would be sent an email, with a link in it which would enable you (for one time only) to download the paper.
That’s the idea. Now all I need to do is design the database and write the associated PHP scripts. Oh, and get all the papers in a form that they can be downloaded, which is actually the most time consuming part.
Views welcome.