Confex Integration: Import a Society Meeting Into a Mobile App From Its Meeting-App Link

A Confex society meeting can now reach HEPCon as a single link — the meeting app members already open. This post covers what changed and why it matters for a society that runs the same meeting every year; the record-by-record detail lives in the Confex guide.

HEPCon now imports Confex meetings from a link. Paste any page of a meeting’s public app — the meetingapp.cgi address members open during the meeting — and HEPCon reads the programme from the public meeting API that sits next to it. No export, no API key, no credentials.

What the link brings across

Sessions, papers with their abstracts, people, the roles Confex gives them, and rooms. Three details decide whether a society-meeting programme reads correctly on a phone, and each is handled:

Roles in the society’s own words. Organizer, Moderator, Panelist, Presenting Author: people appear under Confex’s headings, in Confex’s order, and any heading can be renamed per meeting.
One person, one profile. Confex lists a person once per role. A programme chair who also presents two papers becomes one profile, not three.
Mathematics. Confex publishes formulas as pre-rendered images. HEPCon recovers the LaTeX behind each one and renders it natively, offline.

The full mapping, collection by collection, is in the Confex conference app guide.

Tested at society-meeting scale

We ran the import end to end on a public society-meeting programme of 549 sessions, 3,271 papers, 5,660 people and 89 rooms, with mathematics in about a third of the abstracts. That is the scale Confex exists for — and the scale at which a per-meeting app’s search tends to become the first complaint a programme office hears.

What you still tell us

The meeting app carries neither a time zone nor email addresses. Confex stores wall-clock times, so you give the venue’s zone once, on the request form. Without emails, people are matched by name, and moderator rights in the app are granted deliberately from the organizer dashboard rather than inferred from Confex.

A society that restricts its public meeting API can send the same records as the JSON files Confex’s organizer tools produce; the import is the same.

Why a link matters for a meeting that recurs

A per-meeting app starts from zero every edition. In HEPCon the app stays the same and each meeting is an event inside it, so members who installed it for this year’s meeting find next year’s already there. A link can also be re-read on a schedule, which keeps the programme current through the meeting without anyone emailing files.

How to start

Paste your meeting-app link along with the venue’s time zone. We build a private preview with your real programme within 48 hours; evaluating it is free, and the go-live decision is due one week before the meeting. Prices are on the pricing page, and the Confex conference app page covers what society offices get.