Testing Indico opensource event management software

After organizing a bunch of conferences in the past years I found some communities had problems choosing a conference management software. One alternative or others had some limitations in one way or another. In the middle I collected a list of opensource alternatives and recently I’m very interested in Indico. This project is created and maintained by the CERN (yes, those guys who invented the WWW too).

The most interesting reasons for me are:

• seems to be useful for lots of event types, from minor ones to full academic conferences,
• it’s backed by a very well funded and respected organization,
• has been used in hundreds of thousands events.
• it’s MIT licensed,
• it’s in active development and has a public development roadmap,
• written in python;
• an active support community,
• and many other features.

With the help of Franc Rodríguez we set up an Indico testing instance at https://indico.olea.org. This system is ready to be broken so feel free to experiment.

So this post is an invitation to any opensource community wanting to test the feasiability of Indico for their future events. Please consider to give it an opportunity.

Here are some items I consider relevant for you:

• The effortless open-source tool for event organisation, archival and collaboration
• mobile register apps
• SSO Flask-Multipass
• registration to events doesn’t require user registration https://github.com/indico/indico-plugins
• payments
  • paypal
  • manual
• videoconf: vidyo (seems to be a propietary service)
• URL shortening service
• statistics: piwik
• Syntax highlighter for code attachments
• data import/export
• ACL rings
  • site admins
  • categories managers
  • event creators
• API
  • https://docs.getindico.io/en/stable/plugins/
  • https://docs.getindico.io/en/stable/http_api/
  • https://docs.getindico.io/en/stable/api/

And some potential enhancements (not fully check if currently available or not):

• videoconf alternatives: https://meet.jit.si
• social networks integration
  • Twitter
  • Mastodon
  • Matrix
• exports formats
  • pentabarf
  • xcal, etc
• full GDPR compliance (seems it just need to add the relevant information to your instance)
• gravatar support
• integration with SSO used by the respective community (to be honest I didn’t checked the Flask-Multipass features)
• maybe a easier inviting procedure: sending inviting links to an email for full setup;
• map integration (OSM and others).

For your tests you’ll need to register at the site and contact me (look at the botton of this page) to add you as a manager of your community.

I think it would be awesome for many communities sharing a common software product. Isn’t it?

PD: Great news, next March CERN will host an Indico meeting!
PPD: Here you can check a full configured event organized by the Libre Space Foundation people: Open Source CubeSat Workshop 2019.
PPPD: And now I got your attention check our Congress/Conference organization tasks list. It’s free!