OSEM — the Open Source Event Manager — is the event management application written for the openSUSE community to run its own conferences. It covers a community event end to end: the call for papers, the review of submissions, the programme and schedule, registration and ticketing, and the sponsors page, all served from a single install that a volunteer team can actually operate.

Key Features

• Call for papers — open a call with submission types, tracks and difficulty levels, and let speakers submit and edit their own proposals.
• Submission review — committee members rate and comment on submissions, and accepted talks move into the programme without retyping.
• Programme and schedule — build the schedule from accepted events with rooms and tracks, and publish a public programme that attendees can browse per day.
• Registration and tickets — registration with ticket categories, invoicing support and attendance tracking.
• Sponsor management — sponsor levels and their benefits are part of the event record rather than a separate page someone maintains by hand.
• Venues and rooms — rooms belong to the event, so the schedule and the venue page cannot disagree.
• Email campaigns — send targeted mail to submitters, speakers or attendees from inside the tool.
• REST API — the data is exposed over an API, which is how conference sites pull the programme into their own front end.

Why Use OSEM?

OSEM was written by people who run community conferences with a volunteer committee, and it shows. Everything an organiser needs to answer “who submitted, who reviewed it, is it in the programme, have they registered, who is sponsoring” is in one admin area, and the public side is generated from those same records. There is no separate spreadsheet of speakers to drift out of date.

It is also modest in its demands: one Ruby on Rails application with a PostgreSQL database, deployed with Docker or the project’s own instructions, with no per-seat licensing and no hosted-service dependency.

Use Cases

• Community and FOSS conferences with a call for papers and a volunteer review team.
• Events that need registration and sponsor management next to the programme.
• Organisers who want the conference site to fetch its data from an API rather than duplicate it.
• Small teams that prefer one application over five connected services.

Requirements

OSEM is a Ruby on Rails application backed by PostgreSQL. It self-hosts on Linux via Docker or a conventional Rails deployment, and the openSUSE Events site is the project’s own long-running instance.

Alternatives

• pretalx — a sharper focus on the call for papers, review and schedule, with registration left to other tools.
• Indico — a larger platform that adds room booking, badges and institutional event management.
• OpenSlides — for assemblies that decide motions rather than conferences that publish talks.