1. Set up PC member accounts and decide whether to collect authors' snail-mail addresses and phone numbers.

2. Set submission policies, including whether submission is blind, whether authors check off conflicted PC members (“Collect authors' PC conflicts with checkboxes”), and whether authors must enter additional non-PC collaborators, which can help detect conflicts with external reviewers (“Collect authors' other collaborators as text”).

3. Set submission deadlines. Authors first register, then submit their papers, possibly multiple times; they choose for each submitted version whether that version is ready for review. Normally, HotCRP allows authors to update their papers until the deadline, but you can also require that authors “freeze” each submission explicitly; only administrators can update frozen submissions. The only deadline that really matters is the paper submission deadline, but HotCRP also supports a separate paper registration deadline, which will force authors to register a few days before they submit. An optional grace period applies to both deadlines: HotCRP reports the deadlines, but allows submissions and updates post-deadline for the specified grace period. This provides some protection against last-minute server overload and gives authors some slack.

4. Define submission options (optional). You can add additional checkboxes to the submission form, such as "Consider this paper for the Best Student Paper award" or "Provide this paper to the European shadow PC." You can search for papers with or without each option.

5. Define paper topics (optional). Authors can select topics, such as "Applications" or "Network databases," that characterize their paper's subject areas. PC members express topics for which they have high, medium, and low interest, improving automatic paper assignment. Although explicit preferences (see below) are better than topic-based assignments, busy PC members might not specify their preferences; topic matching lets you do a reasonable job at assigning papers anyway.

6. Set up the automated format checker (optional). This adds a “Check format” button to the Edit Paper screen. Clicking the button checks the paper for formatting errors, such as going over the page limit. Papers with formatting errors may still be submitted, since the checker itself can make mistakes, but the automated checker leaves cheating authors no excuse.

7. Take a look at a paper submission page to make sure it looks right.

8. Open the site for submissions. Submissions will be accepted only until the listed deadline.

1. Consider looking through all papers for anomalies. Withdraw and/or delete duplicates or update details on the paper pages (via “Edit paper”). Also consider contacting the authors of papers that were never officially submitted, especially if a PDF document was uploaded (you can tell from the icon in the search list). Sometimes a user will uncheck “The paper is ready for review” by mistake.

2. Prepare the review form. Take a look at the templates to get ideas.

3. Set review policies and deadlines, including reviewing deadlines, whether review is blind, and whether PC members may review any paper (usually “yes” is the right answer).

4. Collect review preferences from the PC. PC members can rank-order papers they want or don't want to review. They can either set their preferences all at once, or (often more convenient) page through the list of submitted papers setting their preferences on the paper pages.

   If you'd like, you can collect review preferences before the submission deadline. Select “PC can see all registered papers until submission deadline”, which allows PC members to see abstracts for registered papers that haven't yet been submitted.

5. Assign conflicts. You can assign conflicts by PC member or, if PC members have entered preferences, automatically by searching for preferences of −100 or less.

6. Assign reviews. You can make assignments by paper, by PC member, by uploading an assignments file, or, even easier, automatically. PC review assignments can be “primary” or “secondary”; the difference is that primary reviewers are expected to complete their review, but a secondary reviewer can choose to delegate their review to someone else.

   The default assignments pages apply to all submitted papers. You can also assign subsets of papers obtained through search, such as papers with fewer than three completed reviews.

7. Open the site for reviewing.

1. A chair or system administrator goes to the paper's assignment page and clicks on “Request review” without entering a name or email address. This creates a new, completely anonymous review slot and reports a corresponding review token, a short string of letters and numbers such as “9HDZYUB”. The chair creates as many slots as desired.
2. The chair sends the resulting review tokens to a PC member designated as the paper's manager. This trusted party decides which users should review the paper, and sends each reviewer one of the review tokens.
3. When a reviewer signs in and enters their review token on the home page, the system lets them view the paper and anonymously modify the corresponding review.

Reviews entered using this procedure appear to be authored by “Jane Q. Public.” Chairs can still see (and edit) the reviews if they override their conflicts, but reviewer identities are not stored in the database at all.

Alternately, the trusted manager can send the reviewers the paper and an offline review form via email (not using HotCRP). The reviewers complete the offline forms and send them to the manager, who uploads them into the “Jane Q. Public” review slots using the review tokens. This way, even web server access logs store only the manager's identity.

1. Collect authors' responses to the reviews (optional). Some conferences allow authors to respond to the reviews before decisions are made, giving them a chance to correct misconceptions and such. Responses are entered into the system as comments. On the decision settings page, update “Can authors see reviews” and “Collect responses to the reviews,” then send mail to authors informing them of the response deadlines. PC members will still be able to update their reviews, assuming it's before the review deadline; authors are informed via email of any review changes. At the end of the response period it's generally good to turn off “Authors can see reviews” so PC members can update their reviews in peace.

2. Set PC can see all reviews if you haven't already.

3. Examine paper scores, either one at a time or en masse, and decide which papers will be discussed. The tags system lets you prepare discussion sets. Use search keywords to, for example, find all papers with at least two overall merit ratings of 2 or better.

4. Assign discussion order using tags (optional). Common discussion orders include sorted by overall ranking (high-to-low, low-to-high, or alternating) and sorted by topic. Explicit tag-based orders make it easier for the PC to follow along.

5. Assign discussion leads (optional). Discussion leads are expected to be able to summarize the paper and the reviews. You can assign leads either paper by paper or automatically.

6. Define decision types (optional). By default, HotCRP has two decision types, “accept” and “reject,” but you can add other types of acceptance and rejection, such as “accept as short paper.”

7. The night before the meeting, download all reviews onto a laptop (Download > All reviews) in case the Internet explodes and you can't reach HotCRP from the meeting place.

1. It's often useful to have a PC member or scribe capture the discussion about a paper and enter it as a comment for the authors' reference.

2. Paper decisions can be recorded on the paper pages or en masse via search. Use decision settings to expose decisions to PC members if desired.

3. Shepherding (optional). If your conference uses shepherding for accepted papers, you can assign shepherds either paper by paper on the assignments screen or automatically.

1. Enter decisions and shepherds if you didn't do this at the meeting.

2. Give reviewers some time to update their reviews in response to PC discussion (optional).

3. Set “Who can see decisions?” to “Authors, PC members, and reviewers.”

4. Send mail to authors informing them that reviews and decisions are available. The mail can also contain the reviews and comments themselves.

5. Collect final papers (optional). If you're putting together the program yourself, it can be convenient to collect final copies using HotCRP. Authors upload final copies the same way they did the submission, although the submitted version is archived for reference. You can then download all final copies as a .zip archive.