Website (re)development
The meeting’s opening session tackled the complex processes of website overhauls, featuring case studies from GÉANT and Asiera. This is a recurring and popular topic, as there is always an NREN or organization undergoing a rebranding or website relaunch.
Kamila Duvanaeva and Andrea Meloni (GÉANT) walked attendees through GÉANT’s recent website refresh launched at TNC26. Rather than attempting an overwhelming, all-at-once rewrite, the team adopted a phased approach to build a solid foundation first. The presentation gave an overview of how the sitemap was built, which templates and tools were used – i.e. Miro, Octopus.do, Figma – as well as how the tone of voice and image library were defined.
Emma Reilly (Asiera) shared the inspiring journey behind Asiera, born from the merger of HEAnet and EduCampus. They spent ten months unifying their brand across touchpoints and this presentation was an opportunity to talk about their structured three-phase plan, from creating a holding site to merging content into a unified sitemap and committing to ongoing maintenance guided by WCAG accessibility standards, SEO heat-mapping, and various best practices.
NREN tools for marcomms
The second session shifted focus to finding alternatives to commercial platforms within the open-source and/or NREN world. Several NRENs showcased the tools they chose to work with, sharing the benefits but also any challenges they might have encountered.
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ListMonk for newsletters
Lucie Sáblíková (CESNET) presented CESNET’s transition to ListMonk, an open-source, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager. The tool has many benefits and it has worked well for CESNET to escape strict licensing caps and regaining total control over subscriber data, but it does require regular technical support for setup and maintenance.
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Evento and Planer for scheduling meetings
Virginie Blanquart (RENATER) showed the audience how Evento replaced older legacy tools like Foodle for the French NREN. Open-source and GDPR-compliant, Evento operates entirely ad-free for the education and research community and handles hundreds of thousands of monthly participations.
Similarly, Ariela Herček (Arnes) talked about Planer, the event planner developed by the Slovenian NREN. With an intuitive interface for scheduling meetings and building questionnaires, the tool features advanced privacy controls, anonymous voting options, response limits, custom display names, and powerful matrix/column previews.
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Castopod for podcast hosting
Niels Weijers (SURF) shared SURF’s migration from SoundCloud to Castopod. The goal was to reduce dependence on closed American commercial platforms and improve website embedding. While the transition required careful change management and resulted in an initial dip in follower counts, the move successfully delivered digital sovereignty, technical improvements, and native integration with the open-source fediverse.
Thank you to all those who participated in the online meeting and contributed with insightful presentations and interesting questions! All slides can be found on the meeting wiki page. The SIG-marcomms Steering Committee is busy planning the next meeting – don’t forget to subscribe to the mailing list to stay updated!
