Here it is a summary about my activities at the past Linux App Summit this month in Barcelona.

My first goal has been spreading the word about the Indico conference management system. This was in part done with a lightning talk. Sadly I couldn’t show my slides but here they are for your convenience. Anyhow they are not particularly relevant.

Also @KristiProgri asked me to help taking pictures of the event. I’m probably the worst photographer in the world and I don’t have special interest in photography as a hobby but for some months I’m trying to take documentary pictures supposedly relevant for the Wikimedia projects. The good thing is seems I’m getting better, specially since I changed to a new smartphone with it’s making magic with my pictures. Y just use a mere Moto G7+ smartphone but it’s making me really happy with the results, exceeding any of my expectations. Just to say I found the standard camera application doesn’t work well for me when photographing moving targets but I’m doing better indeed with the wonderful Open Camera Android opensource application.

I uploaded my pictures to Category:Linux App Summit 2019. Please consider to add yours to the same category.

Related with this I added items to Wikidata too.

Also helped a bit sharing pics in Twitter #LinuxAppSummit:

We at #LinuxAppSummit are very happy with our brand new «La Frite» boards from @librecomputer. Thanks! pic.twitter.com/ZESAk3hV0P

— Ismael Olea 𐇔 (@olea) November 13, 2019

We have the three lighting talks selected but you can propose your unconference topics still. Remember it'll be a dynamic and parallel session. Lots of joy. #LinuxAppSummit pic.twitter.com/rnL1e44u1s

— Ismael Olea 𐇔 (@olea) November 13, 2019

🤔🤔🤔#LinuxAppSummit pic.twitter.com/RSSoiFUlhY

— Ismael Olea 𐇔 (@olea) November 13, 2019

And finally, I helped the local team with some minor tasks like moving items and so.

I want to congratulate all the organization team and specially the local team for the results and the love they have put in the event. The results have been excellent and this is another strong step for the interweaved relations between opensource development communities sharing very near goals.

My participation at the conference has been sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Thanks very much for their support.

Well, when checking my blog looking for references about resources related with conferences organization I’ve found I had any link to this thing I compiled two years ago (!!??). So this post is fixing it.

After organizing a couple national and international conferences I compiled a set of tasks useful as an skeleton for you next conference. The list is not absolutely exhaustive neither strictly formal but it’s complete enough to be, I think, accurate and useful. In its current this task list is published at tree.taiga.io as Congress/Conference organization draft: «a simplified skeleton of a kanban project for the organization of conferences. It’s is specialized in technical and opensource activities based in real experience».

I think the resource is still valid and useful. So feel free to use it and provide feedback.

Now, thinking aloud, and considering my crush with EPF Composer I seriously think I should model the tasks with it as an SPEM method and publish both sources and website. And, hopefully, create tools for creating project drafts in well known tools (Gitlab, Taiga itself, etc). Reach me if you are interested too :-)

Enjoy!

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!