@User: Yes, it will take some time to put the submission process together (this is the responsibility of efabless, where I work). I can talk to the IT staff about setting up a simple form for now for declaring intent to submit. I will let you (and everyone else) know by next Wednesday what the preliminary procedure will be. If we do not set up a web page for this, then we might do something like fold it into our exisiting "design (/service) request" form, or just tell people to make a helpdesk ticket on the system. I agree that you need to be able to declare intent early on, and that will help us know how many slots we are going to fill, and if there will be more or less submissions than slots (whether or not all submissions will be completed and validated by the time of the submission deadline is another question, of course).

Google Forms turned out to be quite useful for such tasks on the VSD side.