Event management with Indico

There are a number of free systems out there for handling the needs of conferences. Among the others that were considered are Symposion, which is used by linux.conf.au, and OSEM, the openSUSE event-management system. Both are capable systems, but neither seems to have been developed with the idea that others might want to pick it up and run it. In particular, every Symposion installation seems to require a fair amount of low-level customization. The installation documentation for both is, to put it charitably, a bit scant. Indico, instead, comes with a nice installation manual that makes the task something that is, if not actually easy, at least achievable without having to actually learn the entire code base first.

Indico is the event-management system used by CERN; it is released under GPLv3. Since CERN runs a great many events, Indico's features tend to be well exercised and tested. Concepts like time zones, multiple languages, and delegation of responsibility for individual events are fairly well supported. It is clear that CERN has put considerable resources into developing Indico, and we benefit from its release to the world.

The code itself is, it must be said, a bit messy. It is a big collection of Python 2 code, JavaScript code, Jinja2 templates, and Sass source files. Finding where a particular page is implemented can often be a bit of a challenge, and making changes doubly so. The good news is that there is a customization mechanism that allows the replacement of the Jinja2 templates, so some aspects of the site can be easily changed. Some templates are not customizable, though, and changing anything implemented in Python is somewhat more involved.

The top-level concepts in Indico are "categories" and "events"; categories are really just folders that can hold either events or more categories (but not both). The category system is used to organize the events which, in turn, form the leaves of the tree. For a small operation like LPC, the category mechanism is of little use, but larger organizations may appreciate it.

There is a room-scheduling system built into Indico; it can track the attributes of each available room (size, audiovisual capabilities, etc.). Control of rooms can be delegated to specific owners. The origins of CERN show through in many places, and the room system is one of them; rooms are scheduled entirely separately from events. That makes sense if you are running the meeting facility and have to manage multiple events occurring there; it's a rougher fit for an event that moves to a new venue every time, but it works well enough.

Events in Indico have most of the features needed to track their life cycle. Each event has a home page with a reasonable degree of customization; pages of information can be attached to the home page. There is an elaborate mechanism for proposal submission and review. Events can be split into tracks and sessions, with a different coordinator for each session; the schedule for the whole thing can be managed in a reasonably straightforward way. For those who need it, Indico also offers a registration system, though LPC is not using it.

Proposal submission is a little quirky in a CERN-like way. An event can have both a "call for abstracts" and a "call for papers". The former is essentially the CFP that speakers at free-software events are used to, while the latter is the way that the full papers for accepted abstracts are submitted. Few free-software events require the writing of an actual paper these days, so the call for papers feature will go unused by LPC. A fair amount of template wrestling was required to turn "call for abstracts", which reads strangely in our community, into "call for proposals".

The abstracts mechanism allows a fair amount of flexibility in the questions that are asked of aspiring speakers. The answers to the questions cannot be acted upon at submission time, though; one can ask for acceptance of the code of conduct, but not require an affirmative answer to accept a proposal.

The part of the form for specifying the names of the speakers is positively screwy, though; its use essentially requires searching through the database of all users known to the system. In its default form, it can be used to extract the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of all users. Your editor intervened in the code to limit that exposure, but the main CERN site operates that way. When asked about this behavior, the Indico developers said that the system was behaving as designed.

On the review side, the designated reviewers can look at proposals and vote on them. A suitably empowered account can accept or reject talks. An accepted talk becomes a "contribution" in Indico-speak; it can then be added to the schedule and managed by dragging talks to their desired time slots. The schedule itself can be made available in a number of formats.

One of the biggest shortcomings of Indico is that no thought has been given to small-screen rendering at all. After a fair amount of work with a rather blunt hatchet, the LPC site was made to be somewhat usable on mobile devices. Your editor would like to say that this work is going back upstream, but it is best seen as a proof of concept to give a hint of what a proper solution might look like someday.

Another gap is the absolute lack of any sort of facility for an event news stream. There is a site news feed, but it is global and is not even visible from within the pages for an event. Some sort of per-event blog would be a welcome addition to the system.

The Indico developer community is small, but it is friendly and helpful. Regular releases are made; version 2.1 came out on May 16. As noted above, the installation documentation is quite helpful. Documentation on actually using the system is a bit more spotty, but it is far from absent and often helpful. There are no real indications that Indico has ever been through any sort of security audit, and the project does not put out security updates. Chances are, there's an unpleasant surprise in there somewhere.

Overall, Indico is a good base upon which to build a conference web site. The necessary core features are there, and the system is maintainable enough, even if your editor gets grumpy occasionally about how kids these days like to structure their code. With luck, it will serve LPC for some years to come. LWN readers are invited to try it out; the LPC CFP is open now, so this is a great time to exercise the system by proposing to give a talk or organize a microconference on a topic you care about.