Digital Conference Agenda

Board and Committees Program Committee
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Continuing the discussion from GeoLounge for the 2026 Annual Conference:

All we really need is the agenda on a mobile-friendly webpage that you can search and filter instead of a PDF from excel.

Would it be worth putting the agenda onto a temporary website?

Kendall’s open data site was thrown together from text files using Quarto. It’s dead simple, mobile friendly, and supports tags, sorting, filtering, etc. Deploys as static site files, so we could host it anywhere, maybe consider a separate subdomain, like annual-conference.ilgisa.org?

We could have a table for each day of the conference, sorted by time? I would be happy to create a mock-up using last year’s agenda if you like, could bring it along to a board / committee meeting.

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Agenda spreadsheet → a bit of Python → Quarto

Peek 2026-06-30 21-03

@program thoughts? I could host this thing for like 2 cents a day, work with CM Services to get the proper subdomain.

Ignore the fact that the presenter and date fields aren’t displaying properly. This is just proof of concept, could flesh it out if we wanted to go for it.

We could auto-generate speaker pages as well. Or have a set list of categories to show at the side, like “python” “drones” etc

Also: looks decent on mobile!

Peek 2026-06-30 21-10

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That looks fantastic, and if it’s a couple dollars vs the $500 per event for sessionize, then I think we would be all for it. Definitely worth a discussion at the Board meeting Tuesday.
Knowing how we can organize topic tracks to most easily slot them into the site would be another good piece of info to have when we dicuss.

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Should I ask Renée to put it under “Other Business”?

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Yeah, that’ll be good to give it a dedicated spot.

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Actually… between now and next week I could probably get this to a live demo. Maybe I’ll put it up as a full action item. Talk about it, demo it, go over pricing. If we have a quorum and everybody likes it, why not just make it official?

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I really like the look and idea of this! You make it seem easy, Josh.

Should it go through Program and run by @mgaleher (since she’s kind of the lead on all things Annual Conference) before it goes to the board meeting? Just don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We do have a little bit of time before the Annual Conference.

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Well, we’ve got one of the Program co-chairs here who seems to like it, and informally, everyone else I’ve showed this to. I’m asking to put it on the agenda, at least to start a discussion. It doesn’t necessarily need to come to a vote.

I should add: the whole thing would be under Program’s purview, and the final version of the digital agenda wouldn’t be made public until everybody is cool with it.

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I’m good with it! The technical side of it is above my head - so I presume if I provide Josh with a detailed spreadsheet with all of the session titles, abstracts, rooms, dates, speakers, etc.. he would be able to import it all into the webpage… correct?

If that’s the case, I already do this (create the spreadsheet), so it wouldn’t be any extra work for me.

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Correct! I literally took the agenda spreadsheet from 2025 as-is, no changes to the file itself.

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Okay, cool! We are a go on this, at least for an October trial run.

@mkamin and @sspradling I will do my best to be at the next Program meeting, if you want to put it on your agenda.

As far as I’m concerned, I am just tech support on this. The Program Committee will have the say over adjustments to the content, branding, etc, and I can adjust the script accordingly.

October can be our trial run with this, and post-conference we can have an additional action item to make this permanent and devote ongoing funding to it.

Next Steps

Subdomain

We’ll need to decide what we want to call this. State of the Map US just puts the year as the subdomain, like 2026.ilgisa.org. Nice and short, follows an obvious naming convention.

If, long-term, we wanted to use this to keep an archive of past agendas and programs, we might want to include some signifier or what event, like 2026-annual.ilgisa.org, to leave room for things like 2026-chicago-regional.ilgisa.org.

a brief aside

I would suggest not putting past things into the same site, as it would clutter the search results. A single catch-all “archive” site could be created separately, or we just keep each meeting agenda as its own subdomain.

I’m leaning towards 2026-annual as the subdomain, but this can be discussed at the committee meeting.

Once we settle on a name, we’ll ask CM Services to get it officially created and pointed at the published site, which will be updated and made public in October. Easy enough.

Content Adjustments

To be discussed at next Program meeting.

Documentation

The instructions, such as they are at the moment, are written up in the repository README file, so they will appear on the main page of the repo itself.

It’s really just:

  1. adjust some text
  2. run a script
  3. upload a ZIP and click a button

These docs can be updated as the need arises.

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