Track chair: How does Ex Ordo allocate to reviewers?

The Ex Ordo system is designed to make the process of matching reviewers to submissions as easy as possible.

We do this using topics. The topics your authors select will mean they will only receive reviewers willing to review those topics. The authors choose their topics in submission. Reviewers can choose their topics when they are added to the system or you can assign topics on their behalf.

The allocation is the automatic process of assigning suitable reviewers to each submission by sorting through topics and available reviewers. Before you perform this process, your conference organizers will have configured the settings to customize this process for your conference. You do not have access to view or change these settings so any questions regarding the configuration must be answered by your conference organizers.

Explaining the settings

The conference organizers can choose the settings as below: 

1. Choose the number of reviewers who need to look at each submission. They can also choose the maximum number of submissions one reviewer can receive i.e. their maximum workload.
2. They can allow or prevent nepotism. If nepotism is prevented the system will not allocate reviewer to a paper with author who has the same email domain as the reviewer (e.g. gmail.com) or to an author who shares their organisation. 
3. They can decide about blind review settings, and will allow your reviewers to see the authors name while reviewing.
4. They can decide to show/hide the option for reviewers to decline their assigned reviews. If hidden, the reviewers won't be able to decline any allocated review of specific submissions.

Example:

The system will allocate using the information you input as in the above image. In this case, no reviewer will get more than 15 submissions, even if there is an insufficient number of reviewers for that subject area. It also means that if you have too many reviewers for one topic, the system will not allocate to them as it will only allocate one submission twice.  The system will allocate papers to a reviewers with the same email domain as one of the authors, and the reviewers will not be able to see the authors name while reviewing. Reviewer will be able to decline specific reviews.