JBoD meeting #5 - January 27, 2014

3.3 - JACoW-Indico and resources request to CERN

As discussed during the TM, to consolidate and develop the JACoW-Indico collaboration, we agreed to ask CERN for resources to devote to the development of new Indico modules after the SPMS ones, to be better used as a conference DB. Here follows a proposal of a letter to CERN directorate, by Thomas Baron.

As discussed, here is a proposal message that JACoW could send to CERN to motivate the convergence of the tools and necessary associated resources. I suggest it is sent to Professor Sergio Bertolucci (Sergio.Bertolucci@cern.ch) who is CERN Director for Research (which sector encompasses the IT department) and copy to Frederic Hemmer (Frederic.Hemmer@cern.ch) who is the IT department head.

Dear Professor Bertolucci,

Since the mid-nineties, the JACoW collaboration (http://jacow.org) has published the proceedings of all major accelerator related conference series on its website. This role naturally also led us to supply guidelines and software tools to streamline the publishing processes of these accelerator conferences, tools which grew to cover most of the conference organisation workflow (attendees registration, scientific programme creation, abstracts and paper submission, selection and editing etc.). In parallel with this development, we also observed with interest the birth and growth of CERN's conference management solution: Indico.

Both tools have their strengths and emphasis in a slightly different area. We believe that the time has come to converge and aim for a single tool, to optimise HEP resources and simplify life for conference participants and authors of technical and scientific content. We would therefore plea that CERN takes on the leading role in supplying the software and infrastructure necessary to cover the organisational and publishing needs of these accelerator conference series and to the JACoW collaboration. In order to reach this goal, some of the features which are currently exclusively present in our own software (the SPMS – Scientific Program Management System) will have to be ported to Indico, which will require a dedicated effort for the CERN Indico development team. However, afterwards we would be able to pool together our development resources on a single tool, and through Indico a larger audience would gain access to processes that took us years to set up, which we believe would be of great benefit to the whole HEP (and wider) community in the long term.

Best regards

Volker Schaa (JACoW Chairman)