What we've shipped, what's underway, and what comes next for the NetSec website and the open community directory across 2026 and the first half of 2027. Action milestones (conference, plenary, anniversary) are interleaved with release milestones so the website cadence reads alongside the Action's own calendar.
Last updated · last reviewed against the internal working document on .
First public website at netsec-cost.eu. Ten pages, glass UI in light + dark, EU + COST branding, and the open community directory (Deliverable D1, first version) accepting bios via a public form.
One-command release helper, SemVer documentation pack, and a refreshed admin guide.
Release notesPublic press kit with logos and boilerplate, a six-step guided tour of the directory, click-to-expand on compact cards, an A3 promotional poster, and Wiki templates for members.
Release notesPublic FAQ (21 Q&As across six themes) and Glossary (~35 COST and NetSec terms), with deep-link anchors. Find out more grid added to the home page. Wiki signposted for members.
Site-wide search overlay (with rich bio cards and deep-link highlighting), iCalendar feed, streamlined header, and a new About page consolidating the Action narrative, deliverables timeline, leadership, and reference content.
Final launch checks before the public announcement. Manual-translation ribbon corrected on FR / DE pages, mobile navigation drawer made opaque, and links to a named member now highlight the right card in the directory. Accessibility statement bumped to v1.2 with three additional audits. Hybrid release-notes format adopted across the whole CHANGELOG.
Release notesThe conference now has its own page at /essc-2026.html with a programme grid rendered from a daily Indico sync, day chips, parallel session cards, contributions, chairs, abstracts, livestream badges on plenaries and roundtables. Hovering a speaker name that resolves to a NetSec member opens a glass preview card with photo, role, country, bio excerpt, and a deep-link to their full profile. Shipped translations in EN, FR, and DE. Landing page is the canonical URL for the conference in the sitemap and calendar feed.
Polish batch before the conference. Programme grid gains per-session room badges, parallel rows now line up by room across the day, and contribution cards expand the full abstract inline instead of sending readers off to Indico. A new Practical information section on /essc-2026.html lifts the organisers' Stockholm guidance (accommodation neighbourhoods on the red line, sl.se for tickets) into the page. The Indico sync opens a pull request (branch-protection-compatible) and patches data/events.json + calendar.ics from the same fetch, closing a long-standing drift between the live programme and the home-page banner / .ics feed. Mobile visual polish on the home, ribbon contrast on FR / DE, and a small copy-hygiene cleanup of the footer attribution round it out.
Research-interest keyword pipeline on The Network: canonical chips on every bio card, normalisation through a curated alias map (UN, NATO, EU, UK, US, OSCE, … preserved through sentence-case), and a multi-select filter row above the directory grid with URL-hash persistence so a filtered view is shareable. Bios-sync pipeline hardened ahead of the open-form rollout: photo-replacement workaround for an upstream Google Forms limit, defensive write tracking, self-describing auto-PRs. Release tooling now flips the public-roadmap card status pill automatically across EN / FR / DE during release, prints a PDF cover reminder on minor / major, and lists open issues tagged with the milestone you're about to cut.
Release notesPre-Stockholm release. The brand identity finally lands across the site, three Indico operational tools ship to make the ESSC 2027 prep cycle programmatic, the programme page exports a polished self-identifying PDF, and the CLAUDE.md §7 writing-voice rules get applied retroactively across the EN launch-era prose.
A quality patch covering the work that accumulated since v1.8.0. Founding contributors section on About listing the 52 researchers across 21 countries who participated in the COST Open Call (OC-2024-1-27931) establishing this Action. Home-page event cards refreshed against the official Action event ledger: the NetSec Policy Workshop and NetSec ITC Conference added between the European Security Conference and the inaugural MC plenary, and the plenary itself firms to 18 September 2026. Release-infrastructure hygiene: third-party Actions SHA-pinned with tag-comment annotation, YAML-form issue templates with preflight checkboxes, issue-lifecycle automation (needs-info / stale / duplicate / wontfix with auto-comments and a daily sweep). sync-cost.py now propagates per-bio Working Group memberships from cost.eu into data/bios.json so the home-page WG chips and the per-bio chips no longer drift.
Pre-conference cut, four days before the Summer School and ESSC open in Stockholm. Calendar plumbing refresh across the board: per-event .ics downloads + an Add to calendar dropdown on each event card (Google / Outlook / Apple webcal / direct .ics), a news RSS feed at /news.xml for academic and policy audiences who read feeds (sourced from a new data/news.json), and a structural refactor so the home-page event and news cards derive from JSON instead of hand-coded HTML across three locales, including a five-line clamp with Read more for longer descriptions. D10 (risk management strategy) hosted if the document is ready.
A dedicated Working Groups page, with a section per group for its objective, leadership, and a live membership grid drawn straight from the COST directory, and the Memorandum-of-Understanding titles adopted across the whole site. The public roadmap also learns to read its own GitHub milestones, showing a progress bar on every in-flight release and marking the next one as in progress on its own. Around those sit the European Security Conference run-up and the usual directory housekeeping.
This is the big pre-conference directory release, gathering everything merged since v1.10.0. Visitors can now narrow The Network by research theme, by research region and by mentorship, and the mobile filter experience that drives those choices was rebuilt so it behaves properly on a phone. Around it sit lighter photos, new ways to reach the Action, and the usual housekeeping. Three themes follow, then a single canonical index at the bottom.
The NetSec Early-Career Scholars Training School (9–11 Jun) and the European Security Studies Conference (11–12 Jun) at Stockholm University, the flagship outreach moment of the year. The full programme is archived on the site, and the website served as the canonical entry point for new arrivals.
The post-conference release, gathering everything merged since v1.11.0 now that the Training School and the European Security Studies Conference are over. The directory grows from a listing into a working tool: every member gets a shareable profile page at /people/<slug>, can offer to host an STSM visitor or to mentor through the join form, and carries a self-updating list of recent publications drawn from ORCID. An Events page gathers everything the Action runs in one place, and the conference pages settle into a fixed archive. Underneath sit consolidated renderers shared across the three locales and the Management Committee figures syncing themselves from the cost.eu roster.
This release turns the Directory from something you read into something you use. A member can now find a mentor or a mentee through a guided matching panel, open a fuller profile page that links out to their published work, and be introduced more widely as the weekly spotlight begins posting to LinkedIn alongside Bluesky. The site also takes an editorial design pass, loads faster, and moves its Indico programme updates onto a supported, upgrade-safe path.
The Network Map is the main thing in this release. It draws every member of the Action, the Working Groups they sit in and the research themes they share. You can search it, filter it, walk it from the keyboard, and send someone the view you were looking at. The Directory's research vocabulary also reaches every keyword it holds, and the events listed on the site now match what is actually scheduled. Four themes follow, then a single canonical index at the bottom.
The Action's first formal Management Committee plenary, held online for the MC representatives, the Working Group leads and invited observers.
Working Group 2's one-day policy workshop at Bilkent University, bringing members together with policy practitioners.
The home page now opens on what is happening in the Action: the event in progress or the next one, the calls that are open, the latest news and the size of the network in four figures. The European Security Studies Conference 2027 has its page, set for 10 and 11 June 2027 in Belgrade with the NetSec Training School alongside it, and a Year in Review page assembles the Action's first year from records the site already holds. The September accessibility assessment's 155 contrast corrections are in, with no contrast failure left open.
The Action's first year closes. Two MoU deliverables land in this window: D1 (first version of the open community directory) and D6 (first policy briefs). The site hosts each one with stable permalinks and citation metadata.
The call for papers for the European Security Studies Conference 2027 is published on the conference page once EISS and the COST office have approved it, with an announcement banner for the submission window (#1561, #1562). The home page has five sections, led by the directory and the four Working Groups, with the network's figures at the foot of its opening panel. The deliverables timeline on the About page records what has shipped (#447), and the 57 directory entries still missing a bio or keywords are completed through a mail-merge round (#1631).
Authors hear back on their submissions, and registration opens behind the decisions, carrying the accommodation and catering choices (#1565, #1567). Visa-invitation letters gain a named signatory and a template that draws on the registration list (#374). The European Security Studies Prize runs again for the best paper by an early-career researcher (#1566). Mentors and mentees receive a short questionnaire on their experience of the scheme (#1763).
Accepted papers become the programme for the new edition, with the keynote announced alongside it (#1568, #1572). Attendees can build a personal schedule from the programme and export it to their own calendar (#855), and speaker names link through to the papers EISS has published in its Anthology (#1034). Practical information is rewritten around the accommodation and the meals that are arranged (#1569).
Two days of panels and roundtables at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Science, jointly organised with EISS. The NetSec Training School runs alongside it from 8 June.
Changes made to the programme while the conference runs reach the page in about a minute (#1573). Afterwards the edition joins the archive with its full programme, and the following year's page is parked ready (#1574).
Items the maintainer is tracking but not yet committing to a date, each has a clear trigger that would move it onto the timeline.
One-click Suggest an edit CTA on each card, pre-filled with the existing bio. Trigger: three or more MC members asking for faster turnaround than the weekly form sync.
Lightweight email-list signup form, forwarding to the Action mailbox. Trigger: the Action Chair commits to a newsletter cadence.
The NetSec website and directory are built openly, for the benefit of the Action's members, partners, and the wider European security community. We welcome feedback, feature requests, and bug reports, every issue you open helps prioritise what ships next.
This page is the public-facing summary. The full working document, with per-deliverable detail, open decisions awaiting the Action Chair, audit scopes, and the maintainer's reasoning, lives in docs/roadmap-2026.md on GitHub.
