Conference Pleasures (1)

andy.sh on 2008-06-02T15:18:35

Attending conferences and workshops usually assumes that you probably take your notebook with you. (Do you remember a funny picture where a whole room is filled with attendees with macbooks and only one guy is sitting with pen and paper?) Some people definitely take their cool laptops just to show that they have such devices, but most people take it to continue their usual work issues and to continue communicate to the world. The latter leads us to the need of wireless internet in the venue.

So, what do we have to do as organizers after we had found the venue and are going to equip it? Primary goal is to find interesting speakers and enough listeners interested in talks. The more people the more differences in their preferences. One of the possibilities to spread the interest density is to organize a second room (that is only possible if you have many speakers), but again you tackle with the fact that some people wish to attend parallel talks. OK, threading the event is a separate topic; right now I was going to think about what else do we have to provide other than talks.

People come with their laptops, thus they expect to find two things: Wi-Fi and AC supply. Consider them separately.

Buzz
Power supply is much simpler to implement than Wi-Fi network but not every room have enough outlets to plug in. In the late evening before YAPC::Russia I went to a store and bought ten three-meter long extension cords with five outlets each. Several were brought by my colleague organizer. That is totally about 50 free outlets (cords were connected in series so most of them had only four free outlets). The worst is that all those loads were connected to the only two fixed sockets in the room, which is not too good of course. Well, laptops are low-power devices but I’d prefer not to create such weird wired web next time.

At YAPC::Russia we had two rooms and both of them were equipped with AC cords. Good fact is that power was reachable from almost every point in the auditorium.

Back to Ukrainian workshop—which was held in a press-centre of “Ukrainian News” agency—there we had fixed outlets. Not much, but enough. At first Russian workshop we had 40 desktop computers and a mess of wires under tables.

Availability of Wi-Fi depends on several simple factors. For example, here in Moscow we have more or less dense Wi-Fi coverage supported by one of the providers. Unfortunately it is not free, and even more unfortunately it had very weak signal in that place where the venue of YAPC::Russia was. I have an account in that network and could use it time to time, when my macbook thought that the signal is strong enough to connect.

We had an alternative free Wi-Fi network set up especially for the conference. But it in turn was connected to the network of the venue, and that became the bottle neck. The network was almost not usable in the first day (which resulted in that we abandoned the second part of master-class on POE) and was good enough in the second day because it was Sunday and no students were using the internet in the institute.

The best Wi-Fi was in Kiev: “Ukrainian News” had nice routers in there press-centre, so there were no problems with internet there. At “Perl Today” we had more than 15 Wi-Fi networks displayed in a list of available networks, but I cannot say anything about them because simply had no time to test any. Such large number of access points was due to the venue where at that time InfoCom exhibition was held.

To wifi or not to wifi
Both AC and Wi-Fi are not too difficult tasks to solve. Most difficult is to decide whether you need them in the conference room. Different workshops come with different rules, for example FAQ of London Perl Workshop website explicitly says that “it's rude to type during someone's talk and when you're out of talks you should be socialising”. Opposite to that, at workshop in December of 2007 there were several public computers in the hall which were connected to the internet (at least it was said so—I personally did not managed to access gmail.com there).

Attendees of YAPC::Europe 2007 received login and password to local Wi-Fi networks during registration. Difficulties with access occurred, but only in the first day.

German Perl Workshop in February of 2008 was held in a University environment and also was with internet.

Well, typing during talks is not as rude as it could be. Even if you do not provide wireless internet in the venue you cannot force people to leave their laptops at home. Even then they will type if the talk does not fit attendee’s interest. Is thus typing just a measure of people’s interest?

As a summary—I think wireless access and power supply are the Ugly, but more the Good than the Bad.