User types in Symposium

There are several types of users on the Symposium platform: Administrators, Event organizers, Committee members, Speakers, Reviewers and Attendees. All of them must first be Users of the platform.

Platform users

Being a platform User is a prerequisite for everyone who takes part in any way in the Events published on it. To become a User you must complete a registration process, which in Symposium can be done in three ways:

• with SIR university credentials: Symposium has been designed to integrate with all universities that use RedIRIS and its user authentication service. A member of the university community can thus use their SIR identity to become a Symposium user.
• through online services and social networks: you can register as a Symposium User with the credentials a person already has for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Flickr, WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, AOL or Hyves.
• by email invitation: you can register as a Symposium User with an email account after receiving an invitation from an Administrator or an Event organizer.

Administrators

There are two distinct roles in the Administrators group:

• The Website administrator: is responsible for the platform and can manage users, that is, grant different permissions to third parties or revoke them, including creating Organizers, Financial administrators and other Website administrators. An Administrator can assign themselves the Event organizer role or the Financial administrator role, both or neither, depending on the needs of their organization.
• The Financial administrator: is a user to whom the Website administrator grants permission to assign Payment receivers to Events and to carry out the accounting reconciliation.

Event organizers

Event organizers can design, create and manage Events, modify them and track attendance. The Organizer of an Event can authorise other users to share their management permission through the Committees tool, and can even transfer ownership of an Event through the Tools > Transfer event menu.

The Website administrator may or may not grant themselves Organizer permission.

Committee members

Committee members are users whom the Organizer of an Event invites to take on some responsibility. This is done in the Event management menu Tools > Users permissions (Committees). There are three standard Committee profiles, each with a fixed set of permissions. In addition, custom Committees can be created with a list of permissions chosen by the Event organizer.

• Administrative Committee: a Committee whose members acquire full permissions, but only over the Event to which they have been invited.
• Scientific committee: its members only have permissions to define the scientific documentation that will be accepted at the Event, view it and evaluate it, as well as any public comments they may authorise.
• Organizing committee: its members obtain permissions limited to managing Attendees, creating new pages within the Event, editing the Schedule, the list of Speakers and the list of Sponsors, as well as the Organizing committee list itself.
• Custom scientific committee: its members can perform the roles they are given permission for. Unlike the three profiles above, which have a closed list of permissions, you can create one or more custom Committees (scientific or not) and grant them sets of permissions chosen from a long list. If they are granted all of them, they are equivalent to members of the Administrative Committee.

Speakers

Speaker is a very limited role. It is a platform user who is invited to give a presentation or talk within the Event Schedule. Speakers are invited by the Event organizers.

It is important to note that a Speaker may or may not be an Attendee of the Event. In other words, an invited Speaker could give their talk without necessarily acquiring a ticket.

Reviewers

Reviewers are platform users authorised by the Organizers of an Event. Their role is to review and evaluate the scientific documentation of the Tracks assigned to them. Reviewers may or may not be members of the Scientific committee. The difference is that the latter have access to all the scientific documentation, whereas Reviewers can only see the documents that have been assigned to them.

Reviewers may or may not be Attendees of the Event; these are different things. A Speaker can be invited to take part and, on their own initiative or also by invitation, can register to attend activities in the Event Schedule that may have limited capacity or an admission fee.

Event attendees

They are the people who register for Events, that is, those who acquire a ticket, whether paid or not. Some Attendees may also perform other roles if they are invited to do so.