LWN: Comments on "Thoughts on conferences"

Thoughts on conferences

dag- — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:41:25 +0000

I like magnet badges the most. Whereas lanyards put your badge somewhere on the lower part of your belly and get in the way when bending over, magnet badges (or pins) allow you to put your name close to your face, so people can peek at your name without making it too obvious that they had to peek :-)

For someone who has trouble remembering names, but not faces, this would help a lot. Also make sure the names are printed in a font as big as possible. I prefer if the font stretches to fill the complete width. (Sure, some people will have a bigger font than others, but making all badges unreadable because of a few long names is silly at best.)

IRC Nicks on name tags, please

JanC_ — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:40:47 +0000

That could be useful for any form of nickname/username actually (e.g. usernames as seen in some version control systems).

Thoughts on conferences

popey — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:13:57 +0000

Actually we didn't switch to YouTube. We use Blip.tv and from there automatically pump the video to YouTube. As a result you can get the raw video download from Blip.tv.

http://blip.tv/ubuntu-developers

For example here's an easy to use RSS feed which has all the videos as enclosures.

http://blip.tv/ubuntu-developers/rss/

For example:-

http://blip.tv/file/get/Ubuntudevelopers-UbuntuUDSPOrland...

Thoughts on conferences

pboddie — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:43:11 +0000

On the contrary, pouches and string have been done before, and you can even find willing volunteers to make the finished product.

Thoughts on conferences

mjg59 — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:48:12 +0000

At the end of the day you'll probably put your badge in your pocket, and at that point you'll suddenly discover that the magnets have helpfully wiped the hotel keycard that you left in there as well. Not that this has happened to me repeatedly, or anything.

Thoughts on conferences

spaetz — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:23:41 +0000

Dwelling on the important issue of conference badges: A string around your neck, a small plastic bag to stuff the badge into and having the badge foldable so that your name is readable *from both sides*, seems something that is really hard to come up with by conference organizers. :-)

Thoughts on conferences

jengelh — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:57:12 +0000

Magnetic badges were never offered so far, so can't tell. But the idea sounds promising. tinyurls: yeah I could have used html comment writing mode and do <a href="...">[1]</a>, though for some reason I did not consider that at that time. :-)

Thoughts on conferences

wookey — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:43:17 +0000

At least youtube is viewable with free software, unlike most video sites. It would be better if sites gave URLs to the _actual_ video (because it's almost always only the flash wrapper that is broken), but most don't.

Thoughts on conferences

robbe — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:40:40 +0000

What about magnetic badges? If you don't know them: they consist of two parts: a metallic front, and a magnetic piece that goes below your shirt hand holds the front in place with friction.

(BTW, why the tinyurls? I like to know where URLs actually go, and am reluctant to give marketing data to a tinyurl provider.)

Thoughts on conferences

jengelh — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:29:20 +0000

>What is the problem with buttons?

Their backside needles make holes in the shirt. Even if you are careful enough and have enough patience to actually stretch and pierce through the preexisting gaps in the shirt fabric (provided it's coarse enough in the first place), the button's needle often has a larger radius than the interfabric gap. If you don't know what I mean: just try to get a pen through one of the many holes of a fly swatter.

Thoughts on conferences

jospoortvliet — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:12:55 +0000

What is the problem with buttons? At the last openSUSE conference we got a button machine and made name buttons for every attendee. Got only positive responses about that...

IRC Nicks on name tags, please

btraynor — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:24:08 +0000

For conferences geared toward developers, I suggest soliciting a person's IRC nick during conference registration and giving them the option to have it added to their name tag. I wrote my nick on my name tag at ELCE this year and found it really helped to initiate conversations with folks who otherwise only know me online.

Thoughts on conferences

broonie — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:39:38 +0000

Calendars aren't great as it's very intrusive to use them on a mobile device (as the conference gets mixed in with your actual appointments) and often the mobile calendaring apps aren't ideal for dealing with long form descriptions of appointments. That is a nice option to have, though.

Being able to share the same app between multiple conferences is of course good (and most of them actually do seem to use the same app).

Thoughts on conferences

tzafrir — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:16:27 +0000

Why would you need to provide a new one for each conference?

Why not provide calendar as a calendar file? What would you need beyond that?

Thoughts on conferences

jengelh — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 02:07:37 +0000

What not to use at conferences:

1. Objects that pierce or severely squeezes clothing (absolute no-no): buttons/pins [http://tinyurl.com/cbdmmqm ], badge holders with a very strong clip on the backside of [http://tinyurl.com/22rakq ].

2. While round-the-neck/lanyard badges [http://tinyurl.com/d8ensgq ] don't deal potential damage, they flip too often as mentioned earlier. Not to mention that the ribbon is often construed as a Moebius strip rather than a normal strip.

So for me, the best approach so far has been to use simple paper-based sticking tags [http://tinyurl.com/bqcoe45 , what is the technical name for them in English?], they also don't leave any plastic residue like the lanyards at the end of the conf.

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 01:09:40 +0000

thanks, that's very useful info.

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 01:03:57 +0000

The posts from the pycon network admin provide a lot of good info.

But there are a handful of core issues to think about.

First, if the radio portion doesn't work, nothing else has a chance.

The gut reaction of many people is to turn the transmit power up, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Think of people at a party, turning the power up is just everyone talking louder, which just causes more interference. Instead you want to turn the power _down_, ideally to the point where the APs are transmitting at the same effective power levels as the devices connecting to them (after all, it does no good for the AP to be able to broadcast farther than the thing you are trying to talk to as you won't hear the response), since the APs tend to have better antennas, this can be lower in terms of watts out than what the client devices are doing.

Second, don't put too many radios in a given area.

This is tricky as not having enough radios leads to gaps in coverage, but having too many leads to interference problems. Especially on 2.4GHz there are only three usable channels. On 5GHz you have many more channels, so you can put far more APs in a given area without any problems.

Do some testing of the building you are setting up in. some walls are going to be transparent to the signals, others will block the signal. Use this to your advantage to allow you to have more APs in an area without them being able to hear each other (and the people's devices in the other rooms)

As for Directional Antennas.

The first thing to realize is that all APs are directional to some extent, some very significantly so (the 5GHz only netgear APs I've used for the last two years had a significantly stronger signal out the back of the AP for example)

The second thing is that directional antennas help both receiving and transmitting (unlike turning up power which only helps transmitting)

The third thing is to realize that the area of the antenna pattern where it receives poorly can be more important than the area where you get better reception.

The fourth thing to realize is that it doesn't matter if the antenna is hyper-directional and so can't hear another AP (or people sitting in an area) if the clients that you are talking to can hear those people (in radio terms this is called a hidden transmitter)

This being said, directional antennas can help you. they can let you position the APs where there is power and network rather than where you really want them.

If you have a L-shaped layout of rooms, you may be able to position the APs at the corner of the L to cover both legs.

If you have a large room (a long theater layout for example), you can put one AP at the front and one at the back with directional antennas to cover the entire room well.

Once you have the RF portion in some semblance of sanity, then the digital aspects start to come in to play. check how many clients the AP will support, some of them will only allow a small number to connect (I have some expensive 'commercial grade' APs that only allow 32 users to connect for example)

Run the same SSID on all the access points on a given band so that movement between them is transparent. I opt to run a different SSID for the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, although I see claims from commercial vendors that they have technology to 'steer' clients that can use 5GHz to that band, I don't understand how it can work (any pointers would be appreciated)

Watch your Internet Bandwidth. It's frequently hard to have enough. I will have 45Mb at SCALE, and I wish I had 2-3x as much (although it's _so_ much better than the 4.5Mb I had two years ago at the old hotel)

I've got mixed thoughts on QoS, it sounds like it should be a good idea, but there are a few problems.

First, you really need the QoS on the downstream side from your ISP, doing anything from your side is working very indirectly.

Secondly, it's a significant amount of overhead on your systems.

also, look carefully at the bufferbloat info for tweaks to amke

I need to do some diagrams to give examples of this stuff.

Thoughts on conferences

broonie — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 22:44:48 +0000

Schedule apps that work offline are a very nice thing for people travelling to a country where they don't have mobile internet they can reasonably use (even if the conference has good WiFi the hallway track is often a different story). They can also more easily render well on a small screen with lower latency for moving from page to page than you might get with WiFi.

Thoughts on conferences

cesarb — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:16:58 +0000

There are some pointers in the answers to this serverfault question: http://serverfault.com/questions/72767/why-is-internet-ac...

Thoughts on conferences

cesarb — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:40:34 +0000

> with Debian and Ubuntu it's possible to do DNS trickery to point people who are requesting updates to a local server.

From what I have read, with Fedora's MirrorManager, you can tell the Fedora mirroring infrastructure to point people coming from a range of IP addresses to your mirror. So, the effect would be similar to your DNS trickery.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring#H... for the details.

Thoughts on conferences

obi — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:53:18 +0000

Do you have any pointers to documentation on "how to keep you (wireless) network running during events"? We've had two occasions where our organisation's wireless fell over, with a lot less people involved than you mention, so any tips would be very welcome. I'm thinking of things like:
- choice of APs/antenna's/HW/...
- getting the APs to work better together
- outdoor/indoor issues
- etc

Thoughts on conferences

sjlyall — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:34:30 +0000

I'd also put a request in to have the presentations files (pdf, odp, ppt, slideshare) files available as well.

With a video it is pretty hard to go at more than "realtime" speed so I only watch a very small percentage of presentations. With the presentation files however I can download a dozen interesting sounding ones from a conference and skim though them in a few minutes each (looking for ones that really interest me).

Consecutive sessions in the same room

mwh — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:06:41 +0000

To be contrary, I think the plenaries at UDS are mostly a waste of time. It's hard to find a 20 topics (4 talks x 5 days) that are worth taking 15 minutes out of 800 (!) peoples time for. Some are very good, but not enough.

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:58:14 +0000

we did that as well, it didn't help nearly as much as we hoped.

Thoughts on conferences

pabs — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:51:04 +0000

What about a transparent proxy? IIRC Debian has used that during DebConf some years and it worked even when I wasn't using the DNS supplied by the conference.

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:50:11 +0000

even badge holders that have strings to each of the top corner flip fairly easily.

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:48:18 +0000

with Debian and Ubuntu it's possible to do DNS trickery to point people who are requesting updates to a local server. The names involved are _only_ used for the distro repository.

If I understand the problems we ran into with Fedora last year correctly, we found that Fedora repositories are mixed in with other software on the server, so we can't just have a mirror of the Fedora software and redirect access to the local system as people trying to access the other things on the server will not find them.

Thoughts on conferences

speedster1 — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:48:13 +0000

Thanks for your work at SCALE, which is a very good conference. One of my friends and fellow LUG-members is also on the organizing committee, and I've been amazed at all the meetings and work that go on behind the scenes throughout the year, not just the actual month of the conference.

Conference bags

bkuhn — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:02:49 +0000

If we're going to debate bags, I have to note that the best bag ever given was from Atlanta Linux Showcase 1999, which had the perfect grocery shopping bag! My wife and I still use that very bad for this purpose, and we prefer it over all the other bags from conferences over the years.

Thoughts on conferences

bkuhn — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:00:20 +0000

Jake, Good article. I think a lot about “meta conference issues” myself, and I'm glad to see LWN taking a look at them. I have three things to add that I think are worth adding to the points you made in the main article:

First- and second- time organizers really should avoid having more than one track. I'm talking about smaller, regional, weekend events. Many conference organizers of these events get a lot of talk proposals from locals who are excited to speak for the first time. I've been to such events with three parallel tracks, or sometimes even five (!), and as such, attendance at some talks are low because there aren't just enough attendees. I figure the rule of thumb is that if you have a rooms that can hold N people, have as many tracks such that the rooms will be completely full if every attendee attends a session. This won't happen anyway, because there's the hallway track to compete, but it will help speakers not feel like they wasted a trip to speak to six people.
Most badge holders suck! I bring my own badge holder because the default ones really don't function well. Specifically, the default lanyard style is to meet in a point for a clip, and these constantly flip. The only two solutions are: print names on both sides of the badges, or, have badge holders that don't meet at a point but connect on each side of the holder. I have one of my own that does the latter that I bring myself. I like this, because it makes a conversation piece when I'm at a conference where I don't know many people, but I also constantly find myself forgetting names of people I just met, and therefore stuck because their badge is flipped around and the only solution telling them I don't remember their name!
Put the CFP up early and let speakers know early. I doubt this matters to most speakers, but I speak at a lot of events and as such, I have my travel booked at 3-6 months in advance. Waiting around for a conference to let me know if they'd like me to speak messes with my planning and scheduling. I've found this is worse during this season: because of the end-of-year turn over (I suppose), conferences that run in Jan. and Feb. tend to let speakers know in December, which makes planning quite difficult.

All that said, it's a lot of work to put on an event, and I don't blame conference organizers in the least for failing to address my pet peeves. Conferences are a highly valuable part of our community and I'm glad so many have taken on the job of running them.

Thoughts on conferences

Uraeus — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:19:09 +0000

Glad you appreciated the 10am start, been attending conferences a lot myself and I know people often go out for food and drink after the first conference day, so I always wondered why conferences insist on starting early the second day and thus decided to 'fix it' for the GStreamer Conference :)

Thoughts on conferences

spaetz — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:33:03 +0000

> handing out a bag that can be used for other purposes (perhaps a laptop bag or even a cloth grocery bag).

Hiving been at some more "upscale" conferences, I can attest that those conferences hand out such bags. Howver, they are still "cheapish", ie, they are no Crumbler bags :-), and after having visited a few of them, you have more than enough laptop bags for all family members (I started using them to put my swimming pool equipment in them).

Actually, I think I noticed a trend that those conferences started handing out cheap linen bags in recent years which makes more sense. I'd rather pay $50 less conference fee and select a nice bag separately.

Thoughts on conferences

skvidal — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:52:12 +0000

Mirrormanager for fedora can do exactly that for local private mirrors.

Contact the mirror manager admin or come by #fedora-admin on freenode.

Thanks
-sv

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:33:01 +0000

Exactly, it's amazing how many people do exactly that :-), but at the time you are chilling in the lobby it's usually not a problem, the peak problem actually happens during the keynote and the most packed sessions. When you get several hundred people in a room, each of which are carrying multiple wifi devices that they all set to update, then you really have headaches (why the people battle to get into the room and then do this rather than doing it in other, less crowded areas is a very interesting point to think about)

This is why last year we ran a local repository for Debian and Ubuntu. We tried to do so for Fedora, but they are not setup in a way that lets us do so.

Thoughts on conferences

dmarti — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:45:11 +0000

I can't wait for SCALE -- looking forward to chilling in the hotel lobby, catching up on HD videos on YouTube while I do an "apt-get dist-upgrade"

Thoughts on conferences

dlang — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:26:33 +0000

running a good conference network is not that hard if you have a smallish conference, but when you get up to around a thousand people (especially with a tight cluster of rooms), it starts becoming _very_ hard

disclaimer, I run the wireless for SCALE

Thoughts on conferences

pabs — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:57:33 +0000

Indeed! I recently found it a shame that Ubuntu has abandoned their video site, instead relying on Youtube :(

http://video.ubuntu.com/uds/
http://www.youtube.com/user/ubuntudevelopers

The DebConf video team have written lots of documentation about their setup here:

http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Videoteam

Consecutive sessions in the same room

sladen — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:47:56 +0000

Having "several related talks arranged back-to-back in the same room" is what Summitthe UDS schedulerused to try and do, by keeping the same room for a whole day per track.

Summit was eventually changed, to do the very opposite and force a room change each time! Attendees were effectively slumping in a single room the whole day, and never bothering to get up for exercise, food, liquid, or those important "hallway" tracks! Now with the adjustment, the next group of arrivals kick the previous lot out!

The other thing that works really well for UDS, is the scheduling of post-lunch plenary/lightning talks in the main room. After grazing everyone tends to feel a bit sleepy, and an hour of passive participation (such as semi-allowed dozing) helps to ensure that nothing important gets missed in the real sessions later!

Thoughts on conferences

joey — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:06:56 +0000

Unless the conference is of limited interest, producing videos is important. It adds a long tail of value to the conference. I recently saw this LCA talk, which does a great job of explaining how multitouch is Hard
http://lca2011.linux.org.au/programme/schedule/view_talk/...
(actual video somewhere under here but I can't find it just now: http://blip.tv/linuxconfau)

It's also very nice to have live streaming video. If coupled with an IRC channel, it's possible to virtually attend the conference and "only" miss out on the hallway track. I had to attend one DebConf that way, and it was much better than entirely missing it.

While I'm glad to get video from conferences at all, I've also suffered through too many recordings with bad sound, blurry/shakey video, no visible slides/speaker, inaudible audience questions, etc. The best ones seem to have a dedicated team producing the video; for example the DebConf video team has gotten impressively good at avoiding these problems, and even do live switching and picture-in-picture from multiple camera angles.