What we've shipped, what's underway, and what comes next for the NetSec website and the open community directory across 2026. 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. Made future releases boring to cut.
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.
Closed the launch-QA loop before the public push. Manual-translation ribbon correction on FR / DE pages, mobile navigation drawer made opaque, hash-deep-link spotlight on the directory made resilient to RAF deferral. 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 Action's first formal MC plenary. The site reads as the canonical entry point for new MC representatives. The About page and the members' Wiki onboarding strip are reviewed against fresh-arrival flow.
The Action is named for networking European security knowledge, and this release makes that network visible. The Network Map draws the Working Groups, their members, and the ties between them as a map you can explore, so the people who bridge several groups stand out where a list would flatten them, and the gaps show up just as plainly (#764). It is built from data the site already holds and grows richer on its own as the directory and the publication record fill out. The release also brings the Action's first usage figures through privacy-respecting analytics (#727), grows the Glossary field guide into a fuller concept map (#998), and prepares the auto-assembled Year 1 retrospective for the October anniversary (#765). Structural work runs alongside, moving member photos out of git to build at deploy time (#119), with smaller polish in the search overlay's page-and-people filter chips (#1404). Preparation for the next conference starts in the same window, with the edition confirmed, put on the calendar and announced as a save-the-date (#1557, #1559).
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.
Every item in this release waits on a confirmation before the work can begin. The inaugural Management Committee plenary takes a firm date on the public calendar once the Action announces it (#1491). The deliverables timeline on the About page moves from what is planned to what has shipped (#447). Changes to the conference programme in Indico reach the site in about a minute rather than waiting for the daily refresh (#823). The call for papers for the next conference also lands in this window, once EISS and the COST office have approved it, and the conference page is published to carry it (#1560, #1561).
Every author hears back on their submission before the year closes, 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).
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), and the long programme prints cleanly (#364).
Two days of panels and roundtables, jointly organised with EISS and the host university. The organising group confirms the dates and the venue in September 2026, and the site carries them from that point (#1557).
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.
Re-engineer the directory's expand-in-place pattern as a sticky side panel. Trigger: membership above ~150, or friction reports from MC. Re-evaluated end of November 2026.
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.
