GLOW Manual for Colloquium Organizers

Original authors: Wyn Chao and Harry van der Hulst
Later revisions: Marina Nespor, Sten Vikner, Artemis Alexiadou and many others
Latest revision: Éva Dékány, Johannes Mursell, Magdalena Lohninger, Susanne Wurmbrand, Autumn 2026

Here you find a PDF version of the GLOW Colloquium Manual.

1. Initial planning

Form a local committee or at least talk about it with other people in your department or institute.
Explore sources for funding. Before you make a bid, you want to know what chances you have of raising the required amount (see section 3).
Think about themes for the workshops. One or two workshops are normally held the day before and/or after the colloquium, at the same venue or one nearby. The workshop themes are left to the local organizers, but GLOW particularly welcomes workshops on topics usually not covered well in the colloquium.
Consider the venues, i.e., whether there is a large enough lecture hall and nearby coffee/tea areas, and whether there is enough (hotel and maybe other) accommodation in the area. We recommend reserving a lecture hall seating at least 100 people well before the colloquium (at some universities, this would have to be done a year in advance). In 2025, there were 150 registered participants.
Finally, contact the GLOW board with the proposal to host a colloquium. Usually, the next couple of years will already have been planned. The GLOW board will call an online anonymous vote among the GLOW membership on the proposed venue. The venue is approved if the simple majority of the votes are cast in favor.
Write an informal e-mail to the GLOW Board, stating the envisaged dates, prospects for funding, and theme(s) for the workshop(s).
Consult the Resources on Equity and Inclusivity in Linguistics guidebook for organizing conferences: https://genderinlinguistics.org/reil/

2. Information about previous GLOW Colloquia

See here:
https://glowlinguistics.org/annual-conference/past-conferences/

3. Local Organization

Set up a local organization committee and select a GLOW conference president (normally the head of the local organization committee).

It is advisable that the different members of the local organization committee are responsible for different aspects of the organization, including the following eight aspects.

3.1 Financing

Please make a budget well in advance.
Local costs may include: room costs charged by the local university, costs for video/audio equipment and IT support, photocopying and printing, costs for poster boards, etc.
There should be a conference dinner on one of the first two nights of the colloquium. This can be charged in full to the participants.
If possible, there should also be a reception on the other evening, and the cost of this can be calculated into the registration fee. Whether a reception is organized or not depends on the local resources.
The registration fee should be calculated to cover meals and/or catering for coffee breaks and the reception (the conference fees are not a potential source of funding for other costs).
Please inquire ahead of time with your financial department if the registration fee will be subject to VAT and/or if your institution requires overhead payment.
Funding sources: local sponsors (e.g., for meals and drinks), local government offices, private organizations such as The Van Riemsdijk Foundation, publishing houses.
GLOW does not provide funding for the conference (except in extreme emergency situations).

3.2 Accommodation

We advise trying for a special deal with hotels: they could block a certain number of rooms for conference participants and/or offer us reduced rates.

It must be possible to book accommodation between a month and a week before the colloquium, since this is when most participants register. It is also highly recommended to make crash space available to student participants.

Information about hotels, public transport, etc. should be published as early as possible on the conference website.

If you are located in a city that frequently hosts fairs or other events, try to make sure that the colloquium does not overlap (too much) with other large events, as this usually means a hike in hotel prices.

3.3 Venue

You will need:

A conference room seating at least 100, ideally 150, for three days. This room should have a blackboard/whiteboard/flipchart and a projector, a place for the chairman of the session, built-in speakers, and if possible, a table at each seat (for laptops, handouts, etc.). It should be possible to connect microphones to the speakers. The room should be accessible for people with reduced mobility.
A location for the posters. Depending on how the 60 posters are distributed across the conference, this place might need to be rather large and provide enough room for each poster with sufficient space between the posters (to allow groups of people to view each poster and listen to the presentations without disturbing/being disturbed by the adjacent posters). If the poster session is in an outdoor area such as a courtyard, it should be assured that the area is declared non-smoking for the duration of the poster sessions.
Readily accessible coffee/tea areas
A suitable area nearby for book exhibits
A suitable area nearby for registration/help desk
A room where books and materials can be locked away
A room for the GLOW Board meeting on the second evening of the conference (with a projector and a videoconference option)
A room for conference headquarters, ideally equipped with a photocopier
A room for the reception
Rooms for the workshops (if onsite)
Rooms for the PUMP sessions

3.4 Conference website

We have a GLOW domain (the one which hosts the general GLOW website; https://glowlinguistics.org/ ) and offer to create a subsite for each annual colloquium on that domain (for free). The local organizers get access to this subsite and can modify it freely and design it in whatever way they wish (it runs on WordPress). It is recommended that someone from the organizing team has prior experience with WordPress. The GLOW webmaster will assist with the initial website setup but cannot provide ongoing technical support. Alternatively, the local organizers can create an independent website, and we link it to the general website.

Note that we strongly recommend that the local organizers create a Code of Conduct that is posted on the website. The information can be copied and modified from previous GLOW conferences.

3.5 GLOW membership and colloquium registration

All attendees (presenting or not) of a GLOW colloquium must be GLOW members. The local organizers must make sure that this is the case. Below are two potential options of how to do so:

Option 1: Online registration
GLOW has an online registration form embedded into our website where people can pay the GLOW membership fees via PayPal (https://glowlinguistics.org/membership/ ). If the local organizers use a subdomain of GLOW for their website, they can use this form tool and integrate an online registration form where attendees can sign up and pay via PayPal directly. If the local organizers choose this option, they can design a form in which attendees pay the registration fee and the GLOW membership at the same time. All collected money will go to the GLOW bank account and after the registration process closes, the GLOW treasurer sends the final amount (minus the GLOW membership fees) to the local organizers. Note that there is a small transaction fee for PayPal that must be calculated into the registration fee. As the fee depends on the amount paid, from experience, a flat addition of 5€ to the registration fee seems to cover this fairly well. For participants who sign up for both the colloquium and a lifetime GLOW membership, the fee will be a bit higher.

Participants receive an email confirmation immediately after submitting the form, including a detailed breakdown of the amount paid. In most cases, this serves as a sufficient receipt for reimbursement. However, some participants may require a more detailed receipt or invoice, which must be issued by the local organizers. Please note that some hosting universities have specific requirements regarding the information that must be included on receipts for registration fees paid (such as a detailed VAT breakdown or the address of the hosting university). The automatic email confirmation cannot be customized to include all of this information. Therefore, receipts that meet such specific requirements must be issued manually by the local organizers.

Option 2: separate registration
Alternatively, the local organizers can set up their own form of registration and collect the registration fees in whatever way they wish. In this case, they must make sure that all attendees are GLOW members. This can be done by notifying all attendees, prior to registration, that they must become GLOW members via the GLOW website. When registration closes, we will send the local organizers a list of registered GLOW members and they will have to manually check if everyone who registered for the colloquium is also a GLOW member and remind participants to become GLOW members in case they have not done so yet.

3.6 Communication

Receiving and distributing email within the local organization committee, answering various questions directly, sending out various kinds of information on request. This often takes up a considerable amount of time, especially answering e-mail.

3.7 Meals

Make sure people can have lunch and return to the conference in the time provided (usually 90 minutes). If not enough restaurants are available nearby, consider arranging for a buffet lunch at the conference site (this entails charging extra and handing out some form of lunch tickets to those participants who sign up).

Concerning the conference dinner, depending on location, we suggest contacting potential restaurants as early as possible. From our experience, 80% of registered participants join the dinner. We also suggest checking the attendance, as it has happened that people try to join without having paid for it in advance.

3.8 Money matters

We suggest having a dedicated member in the organizing team for money matters. A bank account at the host institution is necessary to handle the payments to the caterers, etc., and to receive the registration fee (either directly or via GLOW once registration closes). Again, please make sure that you are aware of your local VAT situation, as different types of payments (registration vs. conference dinner) might be subject to different VAT requirements.

4. Selection of Abstracts

4.1 Number of acceptances

The main GLOW colloquium (i.e., not including any satellite workshops) must include at least 78 accepted abstracts, distributed over talks and posters as specified below. This has been decided by the GLOW board and membership in 2024 to increase conference participation and give more, in particular, junior, researchers the opportunity to present at GLOW.

4.2 Talks and posters

Online accessibility:

Talks should include a Zoom option so that GLOW members that cannot attend can participate remotely and listen to the presentations. For presenters, we highly prefer in-person participation; a Zoom talk should be considered only if there is a problem with arranging for a visa. Participating online is free and is covered by the GLOW membership fee.

Number and length of talks:

The main colloquium must include at least 6 talks per day, 18 talks in total.
The length of the talks can vary between two options: 45 minutes (plus 15 minutes discussions) or 25 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussions). The choice is made by the abstract selection committee based on the content of the abstracts, reviewer feedback, additional information provided by the authors, and slot availability.
Ideally, there should be six long talks (i.e. 45+15) at GLOW to maintain this special feature of GLOW and the opportunity to present more complex material. Since these slots should only be used when the material warrants it, it may be the case that in some years fewer long talks can be accepted. But there should be a minimum of three long talks at each GLOW conference.

A possible composition of the colloquium is thus:

2 long talks/day (total: 6)
4 short talks/day (total: 12)
20 lightning talks & posters/day (total: 60)

But many other options are possible, and the board will leave this to the local organizers, as long as the frame conditions are met.

Poster sessions:

There should be at least one poster session per day, with a maximum of 20 posters per poster session. Spreading out posters into two sessions per day has proven more practical and productive for both presenters and the audience.
We recommend complementing the posters with lightning talks. Each poster session may be combined with prior lightning talks (e.g., 1-2-minute presentations, without discussions), feeding directly into that poster session. This has proven very productive in the past and the board would recommend it, but we also understand that it may not be possible timewise, depending on the number of posters and talks chosen.

4.3 Abstract submission

Abstract categories: long talk, short talk, poster
Authors need to specify for which category they submit their abstract (multiple selections are possible).
If authors select submission in more than one category, motivation for the choices needs to be provided (e.g., reason for the need of extra time; parts that can be omitted if accepted as a short talk).
As usual, only one single authored and one jointly authored abstract, or two jointly authored abstracts might be submitted per author. Whether this holds across the whole conference (including the workshop(s)) or the workshops are exempt from this is left to the organizers.

4.4 Abstract selection

Important rule: the general assembly of the GLOW conference in Vitoria adopted the policy that members of the GLOW Program Committee (PC) should not submit abstracts themselves, and this rule is still followed.

The PC comprises of the local organizers and one or two representatives of the GLOW board. PC members cannot function as external reviewers and cannot have submitted an abstract themselves. The selection meeting should have the option for online participation, so that the GLOW representatives can participate without travelling.

The selection committee appoints one person to handle the online abstract submission interface. This person will be the only one who will know the identity of the authors (via the interface). They are not allowed to take part in the work of the PC; their only task is to handle the interface (incl. sending out the abstracts for review and notifying authors). The PC selects abstracts without having access to the identity of the authors. Author identities are revealed to the PC only after decisions about acceptances are made.

Each abstract is reviewed by at least three external reviewers. Distributing the abstracts to the reviewers is one of the most demanding tasks of organizing the Colloquium. There is a list of potential and previous reviewers which is passed from one organizing team to the other every year, and organizers may expand this list as the need arises. We suggest that the abstract submission site should make it explicit that by submitting an abstract, colleagues consent to review other abstracts for the conference.

The PC should have a policy for submissions that do not conform to the requirements stated in the call for papers and should apply them consistently across the board to ensure that the process is fair. Formal requirements which are often violated include font size, margins, etc. Conformity to these can potentially be checked with a script. Colleagues who submitted more abstracts than allowed can be contacted and asked which of their abstracts should be considered. Alternatively, all abstracts by such authors can be excluded from consideration.

Abstracts for which all external reviews are negative are rejected without further discussion by the PC. The PC explicitly flags abstracts for which the reviews significantly disagree (there is at least a 2-point difference between the best and the worst score on a 7-point scale), and these all proceed to round two (the PC meeting), regardless of the actual numerical values assigned by the reviewers (with the exception of abstracts with all negative scores as stated in the first sentence of the paragraph).

All abstracts that proceed to the PC meeting are assigned to a lead reviewer, who reads the abstract, the reviews, and takes into consideration the reviewer’s confidence in their own assessment (if this was solicited during the external review process). Ideally, the PC consists of people from different subfields, and the abstracts are distributed accordingly. The lead reviewer does not rely solely on the numerical values assigned to the abstracts but takes into consideration the quality and content of the reviews as well (e.g., “Nice abstract!” is not a review). Reviews which give detailed or explicit justification for their score are given greater weight by the lead reviewer. The lead reviewer assigns their own score for the abstract. They may, but do not have to, provide a written review, and make a recommendation regarding inclusion in the program. If the abstract is recommended for inclusion, the format (long talk, short talk, poster) is also specified. The program is ideally balanced between subfields (but that obviously depends on the abstracts).

If authors indicated that they only want to be considered for a talk, but the PC’s decision based on the review process would be a poster, the abstract must be rejected.

An electronic version of the program is sent to the GLOW web site manager, who will place it on the GLOW web page.

Finally, all who submitted abstracts are notified of the result.When notifying authors of acceptance, ask them to confirm participation and ask them to indicate in their reply if they would like to be considered for the student award.

At the end of the selection process, the local organizers should send a list of all accepted presenters to the GLOW board.

5. Program requirements

In addition to the talks, lightning sessions and poster presentation, the program needs to involve a time slot for the GLOW board meeting at the end of the second day and business meeting and the end of the last day of the main colloquium. Furthermore, the GLOW board strongly suggests a PUMP session.

5.1 Online option

There should be a possibility for GLOW members to follow the talks of the main colloquium, and possibly the workshops, online. Presenters should, by default, be at the colloquium site in person. Online participation is free and covered by the GLOW membership.

5.2 Early career prizes

Starting with GLOW 47, GLOW has been awarding early career prizes for the best student presentations (best talk and best poster) during the main colloquium. The prize is €200 each (if there are two winners for a category, they receive €150 each). Please schedule talks and posters by junior scholars who would like to be considered for one of the awards for either the first or the second day of the main colloquium.

The GLOW board and local organizers jointly select the presentations in a board meeting (to which local organizers are invited). The joint meeting of the local organizers and the GLOW board will take place on the evening of the second day (ideally with tech to use a projector and Zoom). The awards are presented during the business meeting on the last day of the main colloquium, which should be scheduled after the last talk in the same room where the lectures take place.

To get an accurate picture of who is a student at the time of the colloquium, presenters should indicate either at the submission stage or at the participation confirmation stage if they want to be considered for a prize. The local organizers shall pass this list on to the GLOW board. Local organizers should delegate at least one person per poster session to the task of scouting for the best poster award. Current and recent students of the GLOW board and the local organizers are not eligible for the prizes.

5.3 PUMP session

We strongly encourage that a Pop-Up-Mentoring (PUMP) session is scheduled during one of the lunch breaks. An official (and less time-consuming) way to organize a PUMP session is via the Gender Equity in Linguistics Committee (https://genderinlinguistics.org/pump/). The local organizers should include information on the conference web page, register the conference at the above website, and inform all registered participants about the option of signing up as a mentee or mentor.

The PUMP sessions take place over lunch, and some catering for the mentors and mentees should be provided. Depending on the number of participants of the PUMP sessions, one or two rooms should be reserved, which have enough tables and chairs to seat all mentors and mentees and allow for undisturbed discussions.

6. Proceedings

From 2025 on, the GLOW colloquium is having proceedings again. The GLOW board has a dedicated conference and proceedings chair, who works in close collaboration with the local organizers on the proceedings.

Everyone who presents at the main colloquium is eligible to submit a paper (both oral and poster presentations).

The proceedings are organized by the local organizers and the GLOW board but will not be peer-reviewed. We do, however, strongly encourage open community review before submission.

To allow for speedy publication process, the editors will not copy-edit the submissions. If the style guides are not followed, the editors can reject the submission.

Page limit:

14 pages (including references)
for oral and poster presentations

Style sheets/templates and further information be found HERE.

7. Calendar/Time Path

Well in advance:

• See section 1 above.

Before the GLOW colloquium preceding “your” colloquium

Work out the exact dates: preferably between mid-March and the end of April. GLOW has traditionally been organized just before Easter and adjacent to a weekend.
Don’t forget also to plan the dates for the workshops. Make sure conference rooms and accommodation will be available for those dates.
Submit the name of the conference president (normally the head of the local organization committee) to the GLOW Board.
Make sure some of the local organizers are present at the business meeting at the GLOW colloquium preceding yours.

1 month before the abstract deadline

Make sure the program committee has been appointed.
Start contacting publishers regarding book exhibits.
Traditionally, the submission deadline for GLOW has been 1 December. Given that the colloquium takes place in the early spring, a deadline later in the year would impose very tight deadlines on the reviewers and the program committee, or it would leave too little time for the participants between the notification of acceptance and the conference. However, an earlier deadline is advisable if you expect that many participants would have to secure a visa.

January of the year of “your” colloquium

Program committee meeting
Notify those who submitted abstracts, both to the colloquium and to the workshops.
Submit programs of the colloquium and of the workshops to the GLOW website manager.
Submit the abstracts selected for the colloquium (and also for the workshops, if possible) to the website manager.
Submit registration information to the membership manager.
Set up machinery and procedures to deal with preregistrations.

Afterwards

Edit the proceedings in collaboration with the board’s chair of conference and proceedings.
Allow a couple of weeks to settle the bills and wrap up business.
Write reports to funding organizations and thank you letters to various people.
Send in statistics to the GLOW board.
Send in all sorts of comments on and additions to these notes (including corrections of mistakes) to the GLOW secretary.