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Salalah AI Symposium

“From Salalah to the World”: a free, in-person AI symposium in Salalah, Oman, whose operations ran on the event platform NLAI built.

Context

The Salalah AI Symposium was a free, in-person AI capability-building event held in Salalah, Oman, on 20 July 2026. NLAI ran the event's operations on its own platform: a bilingual registration wizard, QR tickets, a camera-based check-in scanner that keeps working offline, and structured feedback.

The symposium, titled “From Salalah to the World — The Grand AI Symposium”, took place in the Grand Hall of the Sultan Qaboos Youth Complex for Culture and Entertainment in Salalah. Entry was free and seats were limited, so registration was required for entry.

Registration captured each person's background and level of AI experience, giving the organisers a picture of the audience before the day.

Challenge

A free event is easy to announce and hard to run well. Registration had to work on a phone in Arabic and English, and it had to be clear about the format: some people assumed an in-person symposium would be online. On the day, staff needed to verify tickets at the door quickly, on whatever connection the venue offered, without admitting the same ticket twice. Afterwards, feedback and attendance certificates had to reach the right people.

NLAI role and contribution

NLAI designed and built the platform the symposium ran on, and handled the event's records from registration to certificate:

  • Registration — a guided, bilingual wizard with an explicit attendance question, so in-person attendees could be told apart from people who had misread the format.
  • Tickets — a personal QR ticket for every confirmed registration, viewable on a phone and printable.
  • Check-in — a camera-based scanner for event staff that admits each ticket once and queues scans when the connection drops.
  • Feedback — personal feedback links for registered attendees and a shared feedback link for the room.
  • Certificates — attendance certificates, each carrying a unique code derived from its registration record.

Approach

The event was treated as one system with a single source of truth, not a set of forms and spreadsheets:

  1. One record per person. A registration is unique per event by email and by phone, so duplicates are stopped at the source.
  2. Tickets that check in once. Ticket codes are random, only a one-way hash of each code is stored, and every ticket can be checked in a single time.
  3. Built for the door, not only the office. Scans made without a connection are kept on the device and synchronised when the connection returns.
  4. Feedback on the same record. Responses and certificates come from the same event data as registration and check-in, so each one can be traced back to its record.

Architecture

Attendee and staff screens

  • Bilingual registration wizardAR · EN
  • Ticket pageQR
  • Check-in scannerZXing
  • Feedback forms
Registrations, scans and responses

Event services

  • Registration with duplicate checks
  • Ticket issuing, storing only a hash of each codeSHA-256
  • Single check-in per ticket, with an offline queue
  • Feedback and certificate records
Validated records

Event records

Prisma · SQLite

  • Events, registrations, check-ins and feedback
  • Live counts and exports for organisersCSV
The operations stack as built for the symposium: every screen writes to one set of event records, which also produce the organisers' live counts, exports and the attendance certificates.

Outcome

  • Registration, ticketing, entry check-in and feedback ran on one platform, from announcement to certificates.
  • Attendance certificates were issued with unique codes derived from the registration records.
  • The same operations stack now also serves NLAI's training programmes, including enrolment and daily feedback for Cohort 9 of the AI Project Building Course.

Technologies and methods

Technologies

  • Next.js
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Prisma
  • SQLite
  • Zod
  • ZXing
  • iCalendar

Methods

  • Bilingual Arabic–English form design
  • Offline-first check-in
  • Hashed ticket tokens
  • Idempotent writes
  • Structured feedback collection

What's next

The operations stack continues to run NLAI's events and training programmes. Organisations planning an AI awareness day or symposium can use the same format: bilingual registration, controlled entry and feedback that is ready for follow-up.

Where this connects

The practice and capabilities this work draws on, for readers who want the technical depth.

Related pages
All work

Events and capability building

Planning an AI event or awareness day?

Tell us about your audience and goals, and we will discuss how to run it well, from registration to follow-up.