v1.14.0 — The NetSec Network Map

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 Network Map

The map is called the Network Map rather than the Atlas, and lives at /network-map.html in English, French and German. It is tagged Beta. The Working Groups page and the Directory both link to it, and every directory profile links to that person's place on it.

The map reports on the network as well as drawing it. It names the two Working Groups or research themes that share the most people. It says how many people each view can draw against how many are in the Action, which is 142 of 192 under Working Groups. It reports how much of the Action comes from an Inclusiveness Target Country, the figure COST weighs. A table of everyone on the map sits underneath it, so the same information is there from a keyboard, with a screen reader, or with JavaScript switched off.

The faces on the page fell from 1.65 MB to 178 KB, and on a phone the map begins inside the first screen in all three languages.

Every keyword reaches a theme

Twenty-nine research keywords in the Directory reached no research theme, so filtering by theme hid the members who used them. All twenty-nine are now filed, and two new themes hold most of them, Climate, energy and environmental security and Democracy, governance and political change. Both are hand-translated into French and German.

Editing the vocabulary used to take a day to verify, because the effect appeared only in the next morning's sync. A dry run now reports what would move before it moves.

September, checked against the Action

Three of the September entries on the site came from an internal working ledger rather than from the Action, and two of them were wrong. A conference that was never scheduled has been removed. A plenary date nobody had confirmed now reads date to be confirmed. The Ankara policy workshop, whose date the same ledger had moved by nine days, has its own page.

That is a reporting problem, so the nightly programme sync now reads what Indico returns for sense as well as shape. A finding names what to change and where.

Underneath

Files a machine writes are written when the site publishes, rather than stored in the repository: the cache-busting version stamp, the 84 member share cards and the 252 profile pages. Each one needed a check proving it was current, and each of those checks could fail an unrelated change. All of them are gone, and a styling change that used to rewrite 315 pages now touches the file it changed.

The site is also easier to use with a thumb and quicker to download. Thirteen buttons sat under the size a thumb reliably hits, and the documentation pack is 7.7 MB where it was 24.6 MB.

Index of changes

The themed sections above are the story; the index below is the audit trail. Same content, terser.

Added

• The nightly programme sync checks what Indico returns for sense as well as shape: a timezone from another city than the venue, a session dated outside the conference, a blank room, an edition that has become a different year.
• sync-bios.py --dry-run reports what a keyword-taxonomy edit would move, and names members it would take out of a theme.
• A sixteenth research theme, Climate, energy and environmental security, covering three members. Hand-translated for FR and DE.
• The Network Map reports how much of the Action comes from an Inclusiveness Target Country, 106 of 192, counted by country and ringed by an overlay.
• The Network Map counts each Working Group's outputs from the workingGroups tag on publications. Nothing appears until the first output is entered.
• A line under the Network Map's figures names the two hubs sharing the most people, how many people sit in more than one, and which hub has the fewest.
• The Network Map's figures say how many people each view can draw, 142 under Working Groups and 70 under research themes, rather than how many exist.
• The Network Map names the 108 members it cannot link to a profile, links to the profile form, and offers a filter for the part of the network the Directory documents.
• A keyboard path into the Network Map: Tab to the canvas, arrow keys walk the hubs and people, Enter opens a profile, Esc clears, each step announced.
• Ctrl or Command with the scroll wheel zooms the Network Map. Drag to pan, a button resets, and a phone pans only once zoomed in.
• Clicking a hub on the Network Map opens a panel under it: how many people it holds, the three hubs it most overlaps, a filter button, and a link through to the group or theme.
• All and None on the Network Map's chip rows, and a Clear on the filter summary. Isolating one theme was fourteen clicks off and fourteen back.
• A search box above the Network Map spotlights a person and their connections, and tells no match apart from a match the filters are hiding.
• Every directory profile links to that person on the Network Map.
• The Network Map's lens, hub filters, overlays, conference edition and selected person live in the URL, so a filtered view can be sent to someone (#1602).
• Everyone the Network Map draws is listed in a table under it, with Working Groups, country and profile link, written into the page at build time.
• The Network Map is signposted from the Working Groups page and the Directory, listed in the sitemap in all three locales, and found by site search.
• Edition chips filter the Network Map's shared-panel overlay to one conference. The row stays hidden while the map holds a single conference (#1584).
• A page for the Working Group 2 policy workshop, Great Power Politics and the Future of Alliances, at Bilkent University, Ankara, on 13 September 2026, in English, French and German. It carries the call, the workshop themes, what the organisers cover, and how to apply, with the application form to download. A home-page news card and a calendar event point to it.
• A fifteenth research theme, Democracy, governance and political change, promoted from the taxonomy's watch list at four members.
• The site search overlay separates people from pages with All, Pages and People chips carrying counts, filtering the results already on screen. English, French and German.

Changed

• Thirteen buttons sat under the size a thumb reliably hits and now clear it, among them the add-to-calendar control, the filter chips and the contact form's send button.
• The cache-busting version stamp is applied when the site publishes rather than written into every page in the repository. A two-line styling change used to rewrite 315 pages.
• Roadmap bookkeeping refreshes once a day in one pull request, where it ran on every merge and every issue filed: 36 automated pull requests against 21 real ones in a day.
• Country names typed into the Directory's research-keyword box are filed as geography rather than as research interests.
• The mentorship panel says that contact means writing to the person yourself, and where a mentor at capacity or a mentee who has found someone can say so. Hand-translated for FR and DE.
• The Network Map's overlays fold into the filter control, which reports how many are switched on while it is closed. The map starts about 100px higher on a phone.
• The accessibility statement, at version 1.4, names the Network Map's canvas among the site's known limitations, and its table and keyboard path among the features in place.
• The Network Map's chip-row labels are hidden at phone width, which stops the two lens chips wrapping in French and German. The map starts about 45px higher.
• The French and German Network Map pages open on the map, with shorter ledes written rather than translated, since the manual-translation ribbon costs 80px.
• The Network Map is labelled Beta rather than Prototype.
• The Network Map opens on the map: a shorter lede, the statistics moved below the canvas, and the hub filters folded into one control.
• The Network Map shows a member's country in the language of the page, on the hover card and in the table.
• The Atlas is renamed the Network Map and moves to /network-map.html, plus FR and DE, since EISS publishes an Atlas of its own (#764).
• The Ankara policy workshop no longer invites applications. The page, the news card, the calendar feed and the .ics say the call closed on 15 August and invitations have gone out.
• The related-events cards in each Working Group section carry a city-level place and the event's theme, and run earliest first.
• The mentorship panel's research area is single-select: picking one replaces the previous, picking it again clears it. The Directory's own theme chips stay multi-select.

Fixed

• Member share cards no longer fail to build when the browser drawing them is slow to start, which happened about one run in two inside the overnight sync.
• The documentation pack is 7.7 MB, down from 24.6 MB, with the five figures unchanged to read.
• Four CI failures in one day were a browser or a server not yet ready. The checks wait for what they need and retry a cold browser once.
• Twenty-nine research keywords reached no research theme and are now filed, bringing ten members into filters they were missing from.
• The fifteenth research theme reads in French and German rather than in English.
• Four keywords reach their theme again: two member typos, one keyword spelled like a theme the taxonomy had not listed under itself, and FIMI rendering as "Fimi".
• The four ESSC 2026 gallery photographs are served at the size they are shown, 290 KB rather than 1.23 MB, which brings the page inside its image budget.
• The signpost CTAs, the roadmap feedback buttons and the Network Map's chips now clear the tap-target size, the signposts having missed it by a single pixel.
• An empty Network Map and a failed data load say so on the map itself, and the empty map names the control that emptied it.
• The Network Map's hover card opens above the pointer when there is no room below, and to the left when there is none to the right.
• Network Map theme labels take the side of their circle with room, and a very small theme drops its label rather than overprint a neighbour.
• A first tap on the Network Map shows a name and a second opens the profile, with a larger tap target. Mouse behaviour is unchanged.
• Without JavaScript the Network Map points to the Working Groups page and the Directory instead of showing an empty frame.
• Co-authorship matching resolves "A. Lovelace", "Lovelace, Ada", "Lovelace, A.P.B." and "LOVELACE Ada". An ambiguous initial is left alone, and an unplaceable name is reported (#1586).
• The Network Map's faces are 178 KB, down from 1.65 MB, served from a map-sized copy generated by the directory sync (#1480).
• The Network Map reads every conference programme the site holds, so a future edition appears on its own (#1584).
• The no-JavaScript home page carried the Ankara workshop's pre-correction date. It now matches the calendar: 13 September 2026 at Bilkent University, Ankara.
• A job title that already names the university no longer prints it twice on the profile page and the share card.
• The Bluesky spotlight post no longer risks ending mid-word when a job title fills the 300-character limit on its own.
• The spotlight rotation holds anyone featured in the past six months out of the running, where it held only the last six weeks.
• The Management Committee plenary reads September 2026, date to be confirmed, across the site, and its calendar entry is marked tentative. The 18 September date came from the same ledger that produced the ITC Conference.
• The NetSec ITC Conference, listed for 8 to 11 September 2026, is removed. It was never scheduled. The COST ITC Conference Grant scheme is unaffected.
• The Network Map's headshots went from 5.6 MB to 1.65 MB, and the page joined the performance budget checks that surfaced the weight.
• Eleven keywords that sat outside the research-theme taxonomy (War, Intelligence, Maritime, Military history and others) are filed under their themes.
• A further eleven keywords surfaced by the weekly taxonomy check are filed, and a member's "Dipomacy studies" is corrected.