Posts Tagged: conference

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20
Oct 09

On Conferences, Chairs, Breakfasts and Wifi Crashes

Think about the following three scenarios for a moment …

Scenario One. You go to a conference. It doesn’t matter where or what the topic is but you turn up because you’ve been invited or because you’ve paid to attend. Breakfast is included in the conference package. There’s 400 people attending the conference but when you get to the breakfast table, there’s none left because they’ve run out of food. When you ask the conference venue why there’s no breakfast they throw up their hands and say “The company who provides our food assured us there’d be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?“.
And now Scenario Two. Same conference. Same venue. But this time there’s only 200 chairs in the venue and you’ve got 400 people trying to cram into those chairs. It’s getting pretty cozy and people are ending up standing or going home. You ask the conference venue why there’s no chairs and they throw up their hands and say ”The company who provides our chairs assured us there’d be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?“.
For both of these scenarios you’d assume that the conference venue and their outsourced provider would have a very quick, very harsh, very frank exchange of views and that it wouldn’t happen again because the conference venue would quickly become a laughing stock.
So now Scenario Three. Same conference and same venue again but this time it’s internet connectivity we’re talking about and internet connectivity of the wifi flavour. Or to be more precise, lack of internet connectivity of the wifi flavour. You ask the conference venue why the wifi keeps crashing and they throw up their hands and say ”The company who provides our connectivity assured us there’d be enough for 400 connections but there’s only enough for 200 connections. What can we do?“.
But with this scenario the conference venues are still in business, the outsourced internet providers apologise and do nothing about it, the delegates complain and nothing changes.
The last three conferences I’ve attended have had this problem to varying degrees. Conference number one had workable wifi for the first 30 minutes before connectivity crashed or the access point ran out of DHCP leases. Conference number two only managed 10 minutes after registration opened before crashing. Conference number three had no problems at all but that’s only because they didn’t offer any wifi at all and left everyone reliant on their own 3G dongles or mifi’s.
People in the tech community with far more reach and standing than me have written about this; TechCrunch wrote about the problems at Le Web and Joel Spolsky wrote about it as part of Joel on Software.
When are conference organisers going to get the message? Internet connectivity, it doesn’t have to be wifi, indeed it’s probably better if it isn’t wifi, is essential at conferences these days, tech conferences or otherwise. And if it’s a tech conference you need at least two IP addresses per delegate, minimum to cope with their laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys and so on.
Until conference organisers make conference venues understand this and start voting with their wallets, this sorry tale will keep on replaying itself.
Photo credit: Leia on Flickr.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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6
Oct 09

The Future of Web Apps? Bad Wifi, Booth Mobbing, Geo and Lots of Schwag

(This post was originally written for the Yahoo! Developer Network blog and was published there on October 5th; it’s duplicated here for posterity.)

You’re stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you’re there, there’s a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue’s net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.

It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it’s called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.

There’s a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, “geoballs” and a free wifi point called yahooligans. Sitting cozily between the PayPal and Vodaphone booths, this has been the home of the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Geo Technologies teams for the last 48 hours.

I presented on both days as part of the University Sessions track. On Thursday I talked about “Place not Space; Geo without Maps“; which was somewhat incorrect given that it featured a guest appearance by Google Earth. Using Yahoo! Placemaker, I showed how you could extract places from web content and sanitise the content with YQL. Whilst it would be great if all the web used Yahoo! web services, we need to work with the rest of the world, so I showed how you could use the long/lat metadata returned by Placemaker to drive Google Earth.

Then on Friday I talked about how “Geocoding and Geoparsing are Easy“; I may have been somewhat economic with the truth. Geocoding isn’t easy and Geoparsing is even less so. This talk showed some of the pitfalls that frustrate us and how we need to model geography in real and colloquial terms and not simply structured and formal terms. Or to put it another way “we can make the internet work better by making it understand how we speak in the real world”.

Both sessions were really well attended, with people standing at the back during the Friday talk, which is a great thing for a speaker to see. FOWA attendees are a very geo-savvy crowd who asked lots of intelligent, challenging and pretty direct questions. There’s nothing I like more than an audience that “gets” a topic.

Back at the booth we were gently but firmly mobbed during break sessions which was pleasantly surprising, given that we were on the first floor. An entirely non-statistical review of the questions we came across on the booth showed three main trends:

  • Tell me about YQL and YUI - they’re really cool
  • Tell me more about this “geo” stuff
  • Is the wifi really this bad?

As an industry we thrive on a strange barter system based around the acquisition and donation of items of branded schwag. We continued this fine tradition with loads of “geoballs” and some much prized YDN screwdrivers. We also thrive on vast amounts of caffeine so it seemed only fair to run a competition with the prize of a coffee machine which resembles the robots that were used in the Fiat “designed by humans, built by machines” ad campaign. To win, all you had to do was guess the number of unique users that hit the Yahoo! UK network on Tuesday September 1st 2009.

Answers ranged from the hugely optimistic “a lot”, to some very precise, yet very wrong, figures, ranging from 20 thousand all the way up to an insane 2.3 billion. The real answer was 24,452,863 users and we were able to unite Raymond Tamblyn of Visa Worldwide with the coffee machine for his answer of 23 million.

And then after 2 days of no natural light, slightly crazed from too much caffeine and throats croaking from too much talking, the booth was dismantled, the purple orchid found a home and we stepped back into the fading daylight and hip shopping area of High Street Kensington and headed home for the weekend and to an internet connection that works.

Lousy wifi seems to be the hallmark of a great web event. Oh the irony.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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7
Sep 09

GeoCommunity ‘09 – Bridging the Gap between the GIS and Neogeo Worlds?

It’s probably an oversimplification of a complex issue but geographic conferences or events can be somewhat polarised towards one of two extremes. On the one hand you have the solid, slightly reassuring and established GIS world whilst on the other we have the upstart, slightly shouty, web-centric neogeography community. These two worlds don’t always co-exist particularly well and each can be equally distrustful of the other. Where 2.0 in the US tries valiantly to get these two worlds to talk to one another and to share a stage but it doesn’t always work well; the GIS community brandish their desktop GIS system while the neogeo hackers point to their PHP based web mashups.

But this year in Stratford-upon-Avon something brave, intriguing and altogether worthwhile is happening; both communities are being represented at the AGI’s GeoCommunity ‘09 conference, which takes place in a little over two and half weeks time. Yes, there’s GIS practitioners and yes, there’s neogeo developers but there’s also speakers covering all points inbetween; just take a look at the PDF of programme for this year. Even the tag line for the conference, Realising the Value of Place, places emphasis on the meeting of the geo-worlds.
AGI GeoCommunity ‘09 – ‘Realising the Value of Place’
September 23rd – 24th 2009, Holiday Inn, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK
True, the big names and the big players of the overall geo community are well represented; Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Ordnance Survey and I’m fortunate enough to be representing Yahoo! Geo Technologies on the second day but take a closer look. John McKerrell of mapme.at is speaking, so’s Andy Allan on OpenCycleMap, Tom Taylor is talking about neighbourhood boundaries and Terry Jones will be making us all location aware by using FluidDB, plus keynotes from Andrew Turner and from Peter Batty.
This is a staggering and diverse cross section of the entire geo-community and Steven Feldman, this year’s conference chair and Chris Osborne, from London’s #geomob, is behind the geoweb track of sessions, deserve recognition for being able to bring this all together; you can find out more at Steven’s and  Chris’s respective blogs.
It’s going to be a geo-tastic conference and I’m looking forward to seeing the usual geo-suspects as well as meeting new friends and colleagues; see you all there.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous