So, you're running a conference.
Two hundred proposals in a spreadsheet. A committee that can't agree. Forty speakers who haven't sent a bio. And a schedule that keeps double-booking Hall A.
We built Gather for exactly that week.
Free and open source. No signup, no sales call, no forty thousand dollar invoice.
First, you need people to submit something.
Build the form. Share one link. Go to bed.
Drag in the questions you want. Add one that only appears when somebody picks workshop, so your keynote speakers aren't answering questions about room layout.
Set a deadline and Gather closes the form itself, on its own clock, not the submitter's laptop.
Two hundred and fourteen of them, in fact.
Split the pile. Score it. Defend it later.
Set your rubric, split the submissions across the committee, and let people work through them with the keyboard. Nobody is reaching for a mouse two hundred times.
Blind review hides names on the server, so it stays blind even for the reviewer who knows how to open devtools. Reviews nobody submitted don't count as zero.
And this is the one that keeps you up.
The button that can ruin your week.
Somewhere in every tool there's a button that emails a decision to everyone who applied. Press it against a screen five minutes out of date and you've told forty people the wrong thing about the most exposed moment of their professional year.
So deciding and sending are two different acts here. Marking a decision emails nobody. When you send, Gather counts the recipients on the server and stops if that number disagrees with your screen.
Forty bios, forty headshots, forty slide decks.
Stop sending the headshot email for the fourth time.
Every accepted speaker gets a page listing what they owe you and when. They upload it from a phone in the back of a taxi, which is where this actually happens.
You watch a dashboard instead of an inbox. Nudge whoever's late, and nobody gets the same reminder twice in a day.
Six rooms, three days, sixty-one sessions.
Drag it anywhere. It'll warn you before you let go.
Rooms across, time down, everything unscheduled in a tray. Pick up a session and Gather finds the collisions while the card is still under your cursor. Room's taken. Speaker's already on stage. Two talks on one track.
The drop still lands. We don't bounce your card back across the screen and make you guess what was wrong with it.
And your website needs to match, today.
Publish once. Never paste a schedule into a CMS again.
Publishing takes a snapshot. Your schedule, session pages and speaker gallery all read that one snapshot, so your site can't show half of an edit.
One script tag puts the same agenda on your existing website, and it updates the second you publish.
Because the thing you're replacing isn't.
Every list, under a fifth of a second.
Nothing here makes you wait to find out whether it heard you. Status changes apply instantly, dragging holds sixty frames a second with a hundred and twenty sessions on screen, and command K jumps you anywhere.
The part nobody plans for.
Your speakers are still here in twelve months.
Every speaker, talk and score stays on one record across every event you run. Next year starts with a directory of people who already said yes once, not an empty spreadsheet.
What we do differently to the one that costs forty thousand.
All of the left column is documented in the vendor's own help centre. It is a capable product. It is also more product than most conferences need, at a price most conferences feel.
It's yours. That's the entire business model.
MIT licensed, self-hosted, no seat count, no per-event fee, no call with a salesperson. Clone it, read it, change the bits that don't suit your conference.
A running install with a seeded conference and no API keys required.