Think fast: what’s the largest meeting ever held? Or take a few minutes—you might come up empty anyway.

You’ve probably heard of the Catholic church’s World Youth Day, but perhaps only in the context of the enormous public mass that makes headlines worldwide. The fact is, WYD is a 10-day meeting, complete with registration, housing, and a big slate of scheduled activities.

At WYD 1995 in the Philippines, an estimated 5 million people squeezed into Manila’s Luneta Park to hear Pope John Paul II’s closing mass. But as with other World Youth Days, that event was open to anyone, not just official registrants for the conclave, who were thought to number fewer than 100,000. So, defining “meeting” the way most meeting planners would, WYD 1995 was not the largest.

The distinction in all likelihood belongs to the WYD held in Cologne, Germany, in August 2005, where the count of registered and paying “pilgrims” topped 630,000. That number did not include tens of thousands of volunteer workers, suppliers, priests, and VIPs.

Imagine that. Imagine trying to register that many people, accommodate them, and schedule their movements. Now imagine it without using sophisticated database technology.

That’s what the church—or more accurately, the local organizing committee in each meeting’s host country—was largely doing before 2002: relying on paper registrations, Excel spreadsheets, and other simple technology. For 2002’s WYD in Toronto, the organizing committee decided to take the plunge into online registration. After an extensive bidding process it settled on Exposoft Solutions, at the time a little-known data management software developer with a Toronto office.

The results were impressive enough that by the time earnest preparations began the next year for WYD 2005 in Cologne, Exposoft had won a huge contract to help the organizing committee there address a much broader slate of challenges. What Exposoft ultimately created was nothing short of astonishing—more than 40 customized applications that in some cases solved problems that appeared practically unsolvable.

Sign-up Sheet

The organizers of WYD 2005 were generally aware of what they wanted to accomplish with automation, but they weren’t able to grasp the scope and detail of platforms that could satisfy their objectives, according to Christian Veldboer, Exposoft’s project manager for WYD.

Exposoft helped to shape the organizers’ understanding of their own needs, with Veldboer traveling to Cologne almost every month for two years and another Exposoft project manager moving there for that entire period.

The first order of business was registration. Several systems were developed for different categories of people involved in the event, but the most important by far was the “pilgrim” registration application. The challenges were many.

First, there was great time pressure, because a registration system is a revenue-generating application. “World Youth Day is all about getting the funding in order to pull everything off,” says Veldboer. “We had to get it up and running quickly.”

That goal was a lofty one because of WYD’s specialized needs. For example, to create a system that could process payments from around the world, Exposoft had to undertake a crash course in local laws and regulations for setting up merchant accounts.

“There was a lot of legal prep work necessary to pull of these registration pages,” says Veldboer. “So many people and institutions had a say in how they were to be used and what they should look like: the German government, which is strong on data-protection issues, the organizing committee, the Vatican, the police.”

Then there were the demands imposed by the sheer size of the event. Hundreds of thousands of individual registrations would have caused a severe drain on the system. So Exposoft tailored the application with an eye to the fact that, unlike a typical conference or trade show, the vast majority of attendees came in groups. If there were 100 people coming together from Brazil, say, there would be only one registration, done by the group leader.

In many cases, group members still needed to be accounted for as individuals, such as with groups from countries that required a visa to enter Germany. But the system recognized exceptions; for example, a group from Germany that did not need visas or accommodations did not have to list all the individuals’ names.

Tongue Twister

Most vexing of all, however, was that there were five official languages for WYD 2005, so all public-facing Web pages had to be delivered in all five of those languages.

That led to the development of a remarkable translation database. Exposoft flagged and labeled every word and phrase on every page, including text, form fields, navigation links, pop-up help windows, alternative text tags for images, etc. Then it created an interface allowing translators to log in and systematically enter translations for each label. Everything first was translated from English, the global software development language, to German so that the organizing committee could understand it. From there, translations into Spanish, Italian, and French were performed.

A key feature of the translation application was that common words such as “city” or “event” that might appear dozens of times across the various registration pages had to be translated only once. A translator could click on a hyperlink to see a list of all the other occurrences of a word and select an automatic translation for them.

“It wasn’t really difficult in the end, but it took a lot of thought,” Veldboer says. “Nothing like this had ever been done before.”

Gabriele Peters, who was head of the Information Technology and Human Resources departments for WYD 2005, says of the translation database, “It was very helpful, but we never would have thought of it if Exposoft hadn’t recommended it.” And of the registration process in general, she adds, “I don’t know how we would have done it without them.”

Exposoft also facilitated translations of documents and correspondence sent among WYD staff and volunteers who spoke different languages. A system was set up allowing such items to be posted online. A translator could log in, see a new translation request and state his availability, at which point other translators would no longer have access to that item. The ability to re-release partially translated items back into the system for completion also was included.

Task Matcher

Another set of major hurdles for Exposoft involved the need to match up attendees with donated accommodations, assign volunteer workers with tasks they were able to perform, and pair attendees with priests for confessions based on languages spoken. The company successfully created programs, based on complex algorithms, for each of those needs.

The greatest challenges were posed in the creation of the volunteer-matching software. While there were approximately 500 paid staff for WYD 2005, there were about 37,000 volunteers who committed their availability for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months.

Creating an automated way to schedule those people’s activities seemed at first blush to be far-fetched. The volunteers spoke about 50 different languages. They had various skills, various tasks they were willing to perform, and various teams or groups they preferred to work with.

“The challenge was to find an interface that would allow us to match the skills and conditions and information about the volunteers to tasks entered by WYD departments,” says Veldboer. “It was almost an impossible undertaking, because of the pure amount of information and because tasks were dependent on a date, a time, a number of people you needed to pull off the task, qualifications and languages needed, and availability in terms of location or geographical distance to the task.”