COMAS aims at making a complete Conference Management System, flexible enough to be easily adaptable for most conference needs. The aspects that Comas directly handles are:
It is best suited for academic conferences (i.e., conferences where the main intrerest are the presentations, not commercial meetings, which are also called conferences in some countries).
It has never broken on my fingers (but it might break on yours)
It demands you to be familiar with its internals.
But really, regarding Comas' status... Umh... Hard to explain ;-)
Comas is more than a system, a toolkit for managing a conference. Comas' back-end code is quite stable and reliable. However, the back-end code is only that: A basis on which you can build a Comas installation. It completely lacks user interface.
As for the front-end, there are two versions - The semi-malleable one, which works fine and has been used for a couple of conferences, but will often exhibit unexpected/unreliable behaviour, and the flexible one, which is a complete (but still incomplete ;-) ) rewrite. Use this if you want to help in development - But don't expect yet a working installation. Many (most!) modules are still completely missing.
If you want to set up a Comas installation that just works, even if its schema is defined according to my needs and not yours, you might be interested in our historical rigid version. It has been used for several conferences, and I am quite confident with its reliability.
The main authors of Comas are:
Comas was first and foremost designed to cover the needs of CONSOL, which first used COMAS for its 2004 edition. The list of conferences which have used COMAS for their organization (to the best of our knowledge) is:
The Comas project is kindly hosted at Debian's Alioth site. You might be interested in the Comas project page. To get straight to the code, download it via SVN:
$ svn checkout svn://svn.debian.org/comas
If you want commit access, please create an account at Alioth and request us to add you to the project.
The best way to get Comas is by our SVN repository. Now, if you insist on getting tarballs, here they are - But keeping this site up to date is not my speciality:
In the svn repository, inside doc/ - handbook/ has the Docbook source documentation. It is slightly outdated (i.e., it still assumes a rigid database, while nowadays it is flexible - for good and for bad).
Contact us. There is plenty to do, I'm sure there is something perfect for your skill level.
Because I am busy as hell. Please, please, if you have some time to spare, are interested in our project, and can give us a hand structuring/writing the pertinent material, contact us telling us so!