The Indico (Integrated Digital Conferencing) Project was born as a European project,
a joint initiative of CERN, SISSA, University of Udine, TNO, and Univ. of Amsterdam.
The main objective was to create a web-based, multi-platform conference storage and
management system. This software would allow the storage of documents and metadata
related to real events.
Indico is currently intensively used at CERN. Most of the events that
take place in the organization are scheduled through Indico, so that the whole community can
consult them and collaborate. Things such as section/group meetings are easily manageable,
allowing the participants to submit materials and share them with others. Many other events
(mainly conferences) which happen to take place outside CERN are currently hosted in
CERN's Indico server.
Indico provides features for the management of the entire conference lifecycle, as well
as for meetings and single lectures:
- Tree-like structure, organized into categories. Each category may either
contain other categories, or contain simple events.
- Automatic web page creation for the events.
- Event evaluation surveys.
- Automatic notifications (i.e., automatically remembering all the participants in
a meeting that it will take place today);
- For Conferences:
- Registration form customization.
- On-line payment support.
- Abstract submission and reviewing.
- Besides these basic features, Indico provides as well:
- An integrated room booking system, extensible, and currently in use at CERN
(replacing the old CERN Room Booking System).
- Integrated support for videoconferencing software (i.e. VRVS11).
- Exportation of information in different formats: RSS feeds, iCal and MARCXML, for instance.
- Multilingual interface (internationalization).
- Support for different time zones.
- Accessible and usable interface.
Indico is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License. This has
made possible the adoption of the tool by several institutions around the world, and the
contribution of code by third-party developers. There's an active user community, which
almost every day provides new suggestions and bug reports. This contributes substantially to
the degree of agility at which the Indico project currently works, providing
immediate bug fixes, patches, and user support.
As of now, besides CERN, more than 40 known instances of Indico exist, in institutions
like Fermilab (Chicago, USA), IN2P3 (France), EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) and the Chinese
Academy of Science.
The version of this Indico installation is: 0.97b
