Towards the end of 2019 we were very lucky to receive a $5000 grant from ARIN (the American Registry for Internet Numbers). We put most of the money towards creating something that would be useful for NOG events. We knew that organising NOG events was usually a very manual affair, with a lot of tedious copy-pasting and duplicating data entry between systems to make things work. So even before the pandemic hit, we’d been exploring the best options for online Event Management for NOGs.
After extensive research we discovered Indico, a comprehensive but somewhat old fashioned event management tool originally built by CERN. It had a bunch of really useful features such as adding attachments, video, etc., to talks, displaying agendas, and more. And, crucially, it’s free to use, as well as being open source. Angola and Uganda NOGs have both used it to host events in 2020.
What was missing was a way to automatically display the information in Indico on a NOG website. Participants still had to click between different websites, and the tedious copy-paste was still a problem. So in order to solve it, with ARINs help we are developing a plugin for the WordPress system. When it’s completed in the New Year, this plugin will be available to everyone, for free, through the WordPress plugin library and our GitHub repository.
In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the plugin in action. Our heartfelt thanks once again to ARIN for your amazing contribution!
Sponsored by
Developed by
