A lecturer from the Informatics Engineering program at Universitas Dian Nusantara, together with a student, has developed Skillfest — a multi-platform event management application featuring smart recommendations powered by rule-based hybrid filtering, aimed at supporting the digitalization of event management.

As public demand for competency development activities — such as workshops, seminars, and training sessions — continues to grow, effective, well-documented, and easily accessible event management has become increasingly important. In practice, however, much of the event management process is still carried out conventionally, from participant registration and attendance recording to information distribution and certificate issuance.

This situation gives rise to a number of challenges, including delays in information delivery, data entry errors, limited activity documentation, and difficulties for participants in verifying their self-development activities. These issues affect not only the participant experience but also the accountability of event organizers.

In response to these challenges, Anita Ratnasari, M.Kom., a lecturer in the Informatics Engineering program at Universitas Dian Nusantara (UNDIRA), together with Arman Juliansyah, an Informatics Engineering student at UNDIRA, developed a multi-platform event management application called Skillfest. The application is designed as an integrated system to support the end-to-end digital management of events, covering registration, attendance, activity recommendations, discussion forums, an analytics dashboard, and digital certificate issuance.

Skillfest was developed using the Agile Kanban methodology to ensure that the design and implementation process remained measured, adaptive, and aligned with user needs. On the technology side, the system leverages Laravel as a RESTful API-based backend and Flutter as a cross-platform mobile frontend. This combination allows the application to run flexibly across various devices while supporting real-time data integration.

One of Skillfest's key strengths is its recommendation system based on rule-based hybrid filtering. This system generates event recommendations by taking into account three core aspects of each user: interests, skills, and geographic location. The approach combines content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and an IF-THEN rule engine, resulting in recommendations that are more relevant, contextual, and logically explainable.

Unlike machine learning approaches, which typically require large volumes of historical data and model training processes, rule-based hybrid filtering was chosen for being computationally lightweight, transparent, easy to control, and well-suited to a system with a growing user base. This approach enables meaningful personalization without placing excessive strain on computational infrastructure.

Through the mobile application, users can view event recommendations directly on the home screen. Each event is presented with a concise summary including the event title, organizer name, date, and pricing status. In addition, a location-based search feature utilizes GPS coordinates to display nearby events on an interactive map, allowing participants to discover activities that match both their needs and geographic position.

Skillfest also features QR Code-based attendance tracking, enabling real-time recording of participant attendance without manual data entry. This feature further supports the automatic issuance of digital certificates to participants who meet the required attendance criteria, making activity documentation faster, more organized, and easier to verify.

For organizers, the application provides a web-based dashboard to assist with managing event data, participant engagement, payment status, activity ratings, and analytics reports. The reporting system also supports data export to PDF and Excel formats, making it suitable for documentation, evaluation, and data-driven decision-making.

Testing results demonstrate that the system's core features perform reliably and meet the needs of both participants and organizers. Through black-box and white-box testing approaches, the system was validated in terms of interface functionality, the integrity of the recommendation logic, and the stability of the data management processes.

The development of Skillfest represents a meaningful contribution from UNDIRA's Informatics Engineering program in addressing the challenges of event management digitalization. By delivering a solution that is lightweight, transparent, and adaptive, the application opens doors to broader implementation — whether within universities, communities, or among event organizers seeking an efficient and integrated event management system.