View source for Useful checklist of things to do (from a past student chair)

===Receiving and Reviewing papers===

* Start working on recruiting reviewers for the program committee immediately after sending out CFP. 
** The program committee as a whole needs to be somewhat balanced with respect to industry/academia, geographic (i.e. by continent), areas of interest, student/non-student, gender, etc. 
** You have to make a guess at how many papers you'll get and make sure you have enough reviewers. Try to have as many reviewers as possible, so that they can only review 2 or 3 papers (which can be a huge factor in them agreeing to be part of the committee). 
** The program committee (especially non-student members) must be approved by the Exec. 
** How to get names of people to ask? It is useful to look for people who served for previous conferences, as well as people who volunteered at the previous event, and it may be possible to get a membership list from your organization, personal contacts, etc. 
* If you plan on doing pre-submission mentoring, recruit mentors as soon as possible after recruiting the committee, so that there is enough time between students receiving feedback and the submission deadline. 
* You will need to create a review form for reviewers to use. Softconf has an interface for this, which is what you should use if reviewing is being done through softconf. 
* Be prepared to handle a lot of email traffic the week that paper submissions are due (not only submissions but you get a lot of questions/requests for information). 
* As submitted papers come in 
** Make sure papers can be printed/viewed. In some cases one co-chair can print a paper that the other can't. Make sure that papers respect the requirements and disqualify those who don’t. 
** Assign reviewers to papers. Allow yourself 1-2 weeks for this, it's pretty tricky to get all the papers to a reviewer that works in the correct area. You may not be able to depend on the keywords provided by the authors, but instead need to look over the abstract/paper and assign your own keywords. Alternatively, you can use the bidding tools for reviewers to choose their papers (a bidding interface is set up in softconf), but it does take time for reviewers to make their bids and for you to then make final assignments.  
** Must assign student and non-student reviewers to each paper. 
* Send papers to reviewers 
** Make sure submission documents are anonymous if reviewing is blind.  
** Softconf also has a parameter that needs to be set to ensure that reviewing is blind within the system. 
** If you make your assignments within softconf, you can just direct the reviewers to the committee page in their softconf account, which will contain their assignments and links to the review form you created in softconf. The softconf MailTool is useful for communicating with reviewers and authors, and should have a template for informing reviewers of the start of the review process.  
* Send reminder notice to reviewers approximately one week (or a bit less) before reviews are due. 
* Receive and collate reviews. A spreadsheet is typically helpful, and you should make sure to read all reviewer comments and create meta-reviews to assist in summarizing and making decisions.