# Introduction

Small research groups rarely fit the hosted-conference product market. Their needs are idiosyncratic, their budgets thin, and their tolerance for vendor lock-in low. The alternative—building from scratch for each event—repeats the same work every year.

Our answer is a *template, not a product*: one Django codebase in which every venue-specific fact lives in a single configuration file.

# Design

The system separates three concerns:

1.  **Configuration.** Name, dates, tracks, rooms, deadlines.

2.  **Content.** Submissions, reviews, decisions.

3.  **Presentation.** Templates and a house stylesheet.

Table <a href="#tab:burden" data-reference-type="ref" data-reference="tab:burden">1</a> summarises the operational burden we measured over the last three events.

<div id="tab:burden">

| Metric                 | Bespoke sites | Template |
|:-----------------------|--------------:|---------:|
| Build hours            |           120 |        6 |
| Deploy steps           |            14 |        2 |
| Incidents during event |             5 |        1 |

Operational burden per event, before and after the template.

</div>

# A Note on Rendering

Papers are stored as LaTeX and rendered to PDF, HTML, and markdown from the same source. The render quality of inline mathematics such as
``` math
T_{\text{setup}} = \alpha \cdot c_{\text{venues}} + \beta
```
matters as much in a browser as on paper, which is why the house style ships three implementations of one visual language.

# Conclusion

Configurable single-template systems are viable for small fleets. The discipline that matters is not technical: it is the willingness to say no to hardcoded venue details.

<div class="thebibliography">

9 Fleet Ops Group, *Beads: Distributed Issue Tracking for Small Fleets*, self-published, 2026. *Tectonic: a modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine*, <https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io>, accessed October 2026.

</div>