Academic Conference File Sharing: Speaker Resources
Manage file sharing for academic conferences. Distribute presentations, papers, and materials to attendees efficiently and securely.
Running file logistics for an academic conference means juggling three audiences with different needs: speakers submitting slide decks and AV requirements pre-conference, attendees downloading proceedings and program materials, and session chairs collecting camera-ready papers and posters. A typical 500-person conference generates 60 to 120 GB across keynote videos, 40-minute talk recordings, poster PDFs, and proceedings. Use ConfTool, EasyChair, or OpenConf for the submission side; a shared OneDrive or S3 bucket for the AV tech team; and encrypted links for last-minute speaker drops that miss the deadline.
Paper Submission and Peer Review Platforms
EasyChair runs thousands of CS and applied-math conferences free at the basic tier. Microsoft's CMT (Conference Management Toolkit) hosts NeurIPS (~15,000 submissions in 2024) and CVPR at no cost to organizers. OpenReview pioneered open peer review with reviewer identities visible post-decision, now hosts ICLR and increasing share of ML venues. Each platform has quirks: EasyChair caps submissions at 50 MB per PDF; CMT handles 100 MB; OpenReview supports arbitrary supplementary files. Check before sending authors the call for papers. For camera-ready upload windows, budget 2 weeks between acceptance and proceedings deadline — authors run late, and your proceedings editor does formatting passes.
Pre-Conference Speaker Logistics
Speakers submit slide decks, presenter bios, AV requirements, and demo files 1 to 2 weeks out. A 40-slide Keynote with embedded 4K video weighs 800 MB; PowerPoint with high-res figures runs 150 MB to 1 GB. The AV team needs everything staged on the conference laptops the day before. Use a shared OneDrive or Google Drive folder with per-speaker subfolders; send each speaker a unique upload link so they don't accidentally see or overwrite each other's files. For speakers with sensitive unpublished findings, an encrypted transfer with the AV team's key avoids the slides leaking before the talk. Backup: bring the file on a USB stick, always.
Attendee Distribution of Proceedings
Proceedings delivery has moved mostly to digital. A 600-paper ACM conference proceedings bundle at ~20 MB per paper totals 12 GB. ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Springer LNCS handle hosting for indexed venues. For smaller conferences, a static site with Zenodo-hosted per-paper DOIs works — each paper gets a persistent identifier citable from other papers, and the whole proceedings gets a parent DOI for the volume. Attendees download what they want; nobody wants the full 12 GB tarball. USB sticks handed out at registration still happen at some venues but feel anachronistic and create e-waste.
Keynote and Session Recordings
Recording a 45-minute keynote at 1080p in H.264 yields about 700 MB; 4K ProRes hits 30 GB per talk. A 3-day conference with 5 parallel tracks generates 50+ hours of recordings, 35 to 1,500 GB depending on format. YouTube Unlisted works for open-access venues; Vimeo Pro ($20 per month) adds password protection and per-video access control. Kaltura and Panopto integrate with institutional LMSs if the host is a university. For embargoed talks — an unannounced product demo or unpublished findings — hold recordings in an access-controlled portal until the embargo lifts, typically tied to a paper's official publication date.
Poster Sessions: Digital and Hybrid
A traditional 48x36-inch poster at 300 DPI is a 400 MB TIFF. PDF export at 150 DPI for screen viewing drops to 15 MB. For hybrid events, digital poster halls on Gather.town, Ohyay, or a custom WebGL space (used by Supercomputing and SIGGRAPH) let remote attendees walk through. Each poster gets a 60-second elevator pitch video. The conference website hosts poster PDFs gated by registration for the duration of the event, then moves to open access after. Print-on-demand via PhDposters.com or FedEx Office lets remote attendees ship a physical poster without traveling.
Code, Data, and Artifact Evaluation
ML and systems venues increasingly require reproducible artifacts — code, data, and environment sufficient to rerun results. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and USENIX conferences run artifact evaluation tracks. Authors submit a Docker image or Singularity container plus a README with expected runtime and GPU requirements. For venues granting artifact badges, evaluators need access to datasets up to hundreds of GB. Globus transfer between the author's and reviewer's institutions handles this cleanly. Zenodo, Figshare, and the ACM Artifact Review DOI registry give permanent IDs for the archived artifact.
Accessibility and Captioning
ACM SIGACCESS, CHI, and ASSETS have driven strong accessibility norms that are spreading. Requirements now commonly include: ASL interpretation for keynotes, live captioning on main-stage talks (1LIVE or Ai-Media at $200 to $500 per hour), slide templates with minimum 24pt body text and 4.5:1 contrast ratios, and alt text on figures in papers. Captioned recordings post-conference serve both accessibility and search indexing. For speaker prep, distribute a slide template meeting WCAG 2.2 AA in advance; retroactive fixes are painful. Conference websites need to meet WCAG themselves — run axe or WAVE audits before launch.
Sponsor and Exhibitor Materials
Commercial sponsors at a big conference (Google, Microsoft, startups) push booth videos, PDF datasheets, and demo interactives totaling 5 to 20 GB per sponsor. The sponsorship package usually includes a dedicated attendee-accessible link in the mobile app. For exhibitor-hosted private materials (under-NDA technical briefs), gate behind attendee registration and an NDA click-through. Sponsors also request the attendee list post-conference — most conferences now require explicit opt-in per GDPR and CCPA before sharing names with sponsors. Be explicit at registration: "Share my info with sponsors [yes/no]."
Post-Conference: Archive and Cite
After the lights come down, pack everything into a durable archive. Proceedings land in ACM DL or similar indexed library. Recordings go to YouTube Unlisted or a conference YouTube channel. Posters and supplementary materials get Zenodo DOIs. The conference website should still be up a decade later — static-site generation to an S3 bucket with CloudFront costs pennies per month. Bad conferences let their sites expire and links rot. Good ones keep the whole history accessible. When attendees cite a 2026 talk in a 2030 paper, the video still plays.
Try it at hexatransfer.com — free, no account, 10 GB max. For the keynote speaker who emails you at 11 PM the night before with a revised 7 GB slide deck, a 12-hour encrypted link to your AV team saves the morning.
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