On the 20th and 21st of March 2023, developers, administrators, and representatives of organizations in the Indico community met in Geneva, at CERN and the United Nations, to discuss the latest developments and future plans for the Project, which included a proposal for a new governance model.

Dirk Duellmann, head of Technical Delivery at CERN’s IT Department, opened the workshop, in front of an audience of 41 people. 8 other participants joined via Zoom. In total, 16 organizations were represented, 3 of them from an industrial background. This event had the particularity of being the first hybrid one in the Project’s history. Tom Haddon and Philipp Kewisch from Canonical spoke via Zoom and gave a pre-recorded talk, respectively.

On Monday 20 afternoon, the participants were transported to the UN, where the afternoon session was held. Kira Kruglikova, director of the Division of Administration at UNOG, opened the session, which included an inspiring keynote given by Dr. Tim Smith, head of Communication, Outreach and Education at CERN/IT (a pivotal figure in Indico’s history), and talks on accessibility and Governance. With regards to the latter, Pedro Ferreira, Indico Product Manager and head of Conferencing Technologies at CERN/IT, presented CERN’s proposal for an approach which balances agility and community involvement.

Tuesday 21 gave the participants the chance to visit the CERN Data Centre as well as the Antimatter Decelerator facilities. The rest of the day was packed with very interesting technical presentations which covered areas as diverse as:

  • Best practices for the deployment of Indico;
  • Web Accessibility;
  • Internationalization, localization and multi-lingualism;
  • Customization of Indico for organizational workflows;

Some of these talks have already become a tradition in the history of Indico workshops: Dr. Dirk Hoffmann’s (CPPM) iconic presentation on internationalization (i18n) was this time delivered in collaboration with Tomas Roun (CERN), Indico core developer responsible for i18n matters. Their thorough and humorous take on the subject sparked a lot of interesting discussions.

The talks were concluded with a presentation by Adrian Mönnich (CERN), Indico Project Manager, on what the future holds for Indico.

The event was successful in connecting the developers with the community, resulting in fruitful discussions about the future of the project. The proposal for a new governance model was welcomed by those present - this will bring new opportunities for collaboration and help shape the direction of Indico. The community outlined the need for more accessibility features, which will be a major focus point from now. Several collaboration opportunities arose from the discussions, such as bulk management of abstracts and contributions for large conferences, Zoom integration, integration with RH tools, improvements in the landing page, and packaging.

Applications are now open for a Community Manager role. If you are interested, please contact someone from the team on Matrix or the forum, or otherwise e-mail indico-team AT cern.ch.

Recordings and slides are available on the Workshop Website.