Creating an event takes about a minute and asks for very little. Almost everything is configured afterwards, in whatever order suits you — with two exceptions that are worth getting right immediately.
Organization manager Creating events is an organization-level action. Event managers run events; they do not create them.
Two ways in
The Events page offers two create buttons. Create Event is the classic form — every field at once, described below. Create with Wizard opens the guided setup: a short interview that asks one question at a time, skips whatever cannot apply to your answers, and ends with a plan you confirm before anything is created. Both paths produce the same kind of event; the wizard simply carries you further before you land in the dashboard.
What the form asks for
The main venue supplies the event's timezone, and several things refuse to run without it. You cannot import a schedule until the event has a venue and that venue has a timezone recorded. Reminder emails are scheduled in venue hours. Set the venue before you build anything.
You can add satellite venues later; only the main venue's timezone governs the event.
What you configure afterwards
Everything else. Branding (logo and banner), the status as the event progresses, satellite venues, tracks, rooms, the team, and — the subject of the next chapter — which products you are using.
Rooms and venues
A venue is a building; a room is a space inside it. Rooms belong to the organization, so they are reusable across that society's events, and each event can give a room a display name of its own — Hall 2 can appear as Hall 2 — sponsored by Acme for one meeting without renaming it everywhere.
Rooms matter more than they first appear: the agenda grid is laid out as rooms against time, signage is addressed per room, and Open Mic issues its moderator links per room.
Venues are organization-level records, so creating and editing them is organization-manager work. Event managers pick from the catalog; if the venue you need is not there yet, ask an organization manager or administrator to add it — with its rooms — before you build the agenda.
Guided setup: the interview
The guided path asks its questions one at a time, and the tree is deliberate: answer no to collecting posters and it never asks about the Poster Viewer; skip the venue and it never asks about rooms. Every question can be skipped and finished later — the interview's job is momentum, not completeness.
Its opening question is the most useful one: "Do you have an event website I can look at?" Give it your event's public site and Rostrum reads the page and pre-fills what it finds — the event name, the dates, the venue, the topic areas, and whether the site mentions collecting submissions. Everything it reads arrives as a suggestion you confirm, never as a silent fill; and if the named venue already exists in your venue catalog, it is selected for you with a note saying so. This question only appears when AI assistance is enabled for your organization — see Chapter 24; without it, the interview simply starts at the event name.
The interview ends at a setup plan — name, dates, venue, rooms to create, and the modules to enable, all on one screen. Nothing exists until you confirm it. On confirmation the event is created and you land in the setup wizard to finish.
The setup wizard
The wizard walks a new draft event through five steps — Basics, Venue, Branding, Products, Review — with a rail that shows what is done, what is skippable, and what launch still needs. It is a guide, not a second set of forms: each step writes through the same settings the dashboard uses, so anything you do in the wizard holds if you abandon it, and anything you configure elsewhere is reflected when you come back. A draft event with an unfinished wizard shows a resume banner on its dashboard.
The final step launches the event — Draft becomes Published in one reviewed action. Required steps must be complete first; the optional ones can be skipped and revisited any time before or after launch.
Building the team
The Team tab lists everyone with a role on this event and lets you add more — an event manager, a read-only observer, or a person you want on the roster ahead of time. Adding somebody who has never used Rostrum creates their account as part of the same step.
Remember from Chapter 02 that most participants never need to be added here. Speakers, authors and reviewers acquire their access automatically.