Online Registration and Membership Services

I was recently appointed as IACR membership secretary, and I am making some changes in how services are delivered to members and conference chairs. As part of this you will notice that we now have online registration for conferences.

Through the extraordinary efforts of Andy Clark during his time as membership secretary, an IACR membership database was created using Microsoft Access. This served the needs of the organization for a decade, but the information management needs have dramatically increased in the last few years from the sponsorship of Asiacrypt, FSE, PKC, and CHES. The existing database was also not well suited to integration with web services. In order to address this, I recently migrated the database to mySQL and implemented credit card services and online registration for IACR workshops and conferences.

I have also been working with Christian Cachin to migrate IACR's web presence from a shared environment to a dedicated machine that will allow us to delegate control for the conference web sites, the paper submission process, the newsletter, and the eprint archive. In the next few months there will be several changes including better conference registration, but most of the changes will be largely unnoticed to members.

The biggest difference will be for conference chairs. Serving as a conference chair is a big commitment of time and energy, but we can make it much easier by providing a common service for chairs to manage their information. In past years each conference chair was responsible for creating their own registration and conference submission site, but in the future we should be able to use the same system for each new conference or workshop.

If any of you have suggestions for how to improve IACR information services, please contact me.

- Kevin McCurley