frab is a web-based conference planning and management system. It helps to collect submissions, to manage talks and speakers and to create a schedule.
frab is not under heavy development anymore. Releases merely mark huge updates and add a changelog. There are no separate release branches, fixes and development happen in master. We want the master branch to be usable at all times.
frab has been used to organize FrOSCon since 2011, a conference with more than 100 talks (and as many speakers) in more than 5 parallel tracks (plus devrooms) over 2 days. frab is also used by the Chaos Communication Congress.
The frab wiki hosts a list of conferences using frab. Feel free to add your conference to the wiki.
Take a look at the screenshots to get an idea of what frab does. The full manual can be found in the wiki.
frab is a pretty standard Ruby on Rails application. There should be plenty of tutorials online on how to install, deploy and setup these.
See installation for more frab specific information.
It's possible to run frab via docker, or on a PaaS like heroku or dokku.
These are executed from the command line to export conferences and static schedules, send emails or help with development. The manual has a chapter on rake tasks for production.
More documentation on available rake tasks can be found in the wiki
or by running rails -D.
frab supports OTRS, RT and Redmine ticket servers. Instead of sending event acceptance/rejection mails directly to submitters, frab adds a ticket to a request tracker.
The ticket server type can be configured for every conference.
Install the iPHoneHandle support if you're using OTRS.
frab was originally created for the organization of FrOSCon 2011. FrOSCon has previously used pentabarf (http://pentabarf.org), and although frab is a completely new implementation, it borrows heavily from pentabarf.
Both FrOSCon and frab owe a lot to pentabarf. But sadly, pentabarf seems to be abandoned. And several problems make it hard to maintain. Thus we decided to create a new system.
frab is licensed under an MIT-License. It bundles some third-party libraries and assets that might be licensed differently. See LICENSE.