Blind review is simple to describe and easy to implement badly. What to hide, how to assign reviewers, handling conflicts of interest, and where blind review stops helping.
Every conference committee believes it judges on merit. Blind review is how you find out. It is also how you defend the programme afterwards, which matters more than most organisers expect.
Hide from reviewers: name, organisation, email, and anything in the abstract that identifies the author ("as we showed in our 2024 paper…"). Keep visible: the abstract, format, level, and topic.
Do not hide the speaker's experience if your criteria include it — instead, separate the score. Score the proposal blind, then reveal the speaker and score suitability in a second pass. Pretending speaker quality does not matter produces a fair process and a poor stage.
A pool where reviewers pick what to review produces twelve reviews of the popular topic and none of the specialist one. Assign three reviewers per submission, matched to expertise, with a deadline. It is more administration and it is the difference between coverage and chaos.
Colleague, co-author in the last three years, same institution, commercial relationship. Ask reviewers to declare and recuse, and make recusal easy and unremarkable. A conflict declared afterwards is an argument; declared beforehand it is process.
One to five, against your published criteria, plus one required sentence of comment. A ten-point scale produces false precision and endless 7-versus-8 debates. The written sentence is what actually helps at the committee meeting — and, reworded, is what makes a rejection useful to the person receiving it.
The top decile and the bottom decile decide themselves. Spend the committee meeting on the band in the middle, where reviewer scores disagree — that disagreement is usually a signal that the proposal is unusual, which is often exactly what a programme needs.
A short paragraph on the website: how many submissions, how many reviewers, how many accepted, and the criteria. It costs nothing, and it is what makes the programme defensible when someone asks why their proposal was not chosen.
Gathervo supports blind and assigned committee review, with conflicts, scores and comments held against each submission, and accepted proposals flowing straight into the agenda. Try it free.
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