On 1 February, in recognition of the Indico tool, CERN was presented with the "special award for effective and innovative online meetings" at the 7th Geneva Engage Awards online event, organised by the Geneva Internet Platform. The annual Geneva Engage Awards recognise International Geneva actors for their social media outreach, online engagement and efforts towards more inclusive online meetings.
Launched at CERN in 2002 as a European project, Indico is an open-source tool for event organisation, archiving and collaboration. CERN adopted it as its own event-management solution in 2004 and has financed its development ever since. Other partners and external contributors have provided valuable contributions over the years.
"Receiving this award is a great honour for the whole team and also highlights the importance of the project, not only for CERN, but also outside the physics community," says Adrian Mönnich, leader of the Indico project.
Indeed, since its launch, Indico has been used at CERN for the organisation of more than 900 000 events, and is daily used to manage 200 rooms. The platform has also been adopted by the United Nations and other organisations in Geneva and beyond.
"Not only is this Geneva Engage Award a very welcome recognition of the ceaseless dedication of the Indico team, it also represents acknowledgement of an important step in the wider adoption of and support for Indico," says Tim Smith, leader of the Collaboration, Devices and Applications (CDA) group in CERN's IT department. "Working with significant external contributors such as the UN means strong and visible support for an open-source project."