I’m now trying to use Indico to organize LibreOffice Asia Conference 2020 which will be held in Sep. 8-10 in Taiwan (and if you’re a LibreOffice user/fan/expert welcome to attend!). Also I’m trying to translate Indico into Chinese.
I found that I keep using my own way to try understand what were defined in Indico, so it’s time to clarify the structures of events in Indico.
In my experiences (or say, imagination) a conference has
Opening/Closing sessions
Keynote speeches (for the whole attendees)
Several (concurrent) tracks, with each has its own main topic, and contains
several sessions, including talks, workshops, and so on. Each session has a title (topic) which is related to the topic of the track and may have one or more speakers.
break/tea time
However it seems that it is not defined this way in Indico. I couldn’t find any document explaining this, so I’ve tried for some time. In Indico, to my understanding, it has
Tracks
Programme
“Scientific programme”
Sessions
Session block
Contribution
subcontribution
I can add new tracks, sessions and contributions but they seem to be independent with each other. When defining a session there is no “speaker” or “author”, which appears in “contributions”. In timetable I can add a session block which can select a session, and add a contribution which has its own type other than sessions. And among all the progress there is nothing to do with “tracks”.
I can only find installation guide and developing related in the documentation. I haven’t found any doc or article explaining the relationships between the above terms.
Would anyone please explain how Indico defines a lecture, meeting or conference? How does Indico define the elements in a conference like the “Tracks” and “Sessions” I said in the beginning?
I’ll try to give you the typical mapping (in indico many thinsg can be done in different ways:
generally: talk, workshop etc are all ‘contributions’
In my experiences (or say, imagination) a conference has
Opening/Closing sessions
=> either a dedicated ’ session’ or a free-standing top-level contribution
Keynote speeches (for the whole attendees)
=> a sessions containing a session block containing the speeches => contains scheduled contributions
Several (concurrent) tracks, with each has its own main topic, and contains
several sessions, including talks, workshops, and so on. Each session has a title (topic) which is related to the topic of the track and may have one or more speakers.
=> the tracks are mapped onto parallel sessions with session blocks (that is your ‘session’ (containing the talks) and breaks.
break/tea time
In indico the tracks serve primarily as a means to classify incoming abstracts and they can be assosiated with a (default) session for scheduling purposes.
But when I access the timetable I can add a session block as well as a contribution. In this case I couldn’t see what role the “session” plays here.
So if I don’t need a call for abstracts phase, I don’t need to define track anyway?
The “track” seems to be used equally (?) with “(scientific) programme”. Does “programme” (program?) have other specific meanings?
That’s one of the flexibilities in indico: You can add contributions outside of sessions, which means the contribution takes the roles of both a session and a contribution.
Adding a contribution to a session actually will add a session_block to contain the contribution if none exists.
The ‘Programme’ is compiled from the tracks. In my eyes, this is actually an unfortunate name, it’s more a ‘topics’ or just track list describing the scope of conference.