Conference template utopia needed

I’m co-chairing the live coding conference in July, and am trying to make some templates for it. It seems to be fashionable in my corner of academia to do academic writing in markdown these days, using the excellent pandoc tool to convert it to LaTeX or Word for submission. Here’s a quick guide for doing that.

The good thing about using markdown/pandoc though is that it also renders for the web and a bazillion formats, referneces and all. So it would make much more sense for the conference to accept papers in markdown, and then produce proceedings in both online for-web (html) and for-print (pdf) form, as well as potentially in various ebook formats, etc.

So that’s what I hope to be doing. I recognise some people won’t find learning how to use markdown and pandoc a reasonable prospect, and so will still provide word and open document templates.. But papers submitted in those formats will only be readable in PDF form.

I need some help though! If you have used markdown for academic papers, please share your experiences, favourite editors, gotchas, etc.. What advice/resources are there for people new to markdown? Any online tools that can help with collaboration? Have any other conferences gone down this route? You might also want to take a look at work in progress and comment on it and perhaps even contribute directly. Or if you think this is a terrible idea, and we should stick with the traditional word and LaTeX templates, please let me know. Thanks!