I can't wait for the Fedora Events FAD that's happening next weekend in Raleigh - we have some lofty goals for the FAD, but I think that the most challenging is going to be fixing the "we broke BarCamp" bug from Toronto. As we scale in Fedora, we're going to hit this sort of challenge at lots of events.
I think that some of the issues were related to communications failure, though - there was plenty of confusion at the hotel about exactly what time we were supposed to be at the venue, therefore, lots of people showed up late. I'm not sure what exactly can be done about this - post signs at the hotel explaining when folks need to be there? A fudcon-attendees mailing list? These are just a few of the options to consider, I'm certainly open to other ones.
Also, not a slight at the location, but having to take mass transit that only comes once every 15 minutes or so is guaranteed to create issues - the bus was simply not designed to carry THAT many people getting on at the same time. All of the other times at FUDCon that I can recall, the venue was within easy walking distance of the hotel, a definite plus (come to think of it. I'm not sure that was the case at my very first FUDCon - 2008 in Raleigh).
Another thing that we need to deal with is the inevitable fail that comes with putting lots of geeks in a single hotel - the network will be absolutely useless - we need to just accept the fact that at the hotel, we'll have no connectivity to the outside world. We've seen this time and time again, yet we still don't have a way to deal with it and still communicate. I think that while IRC is a wonderful medium of communication, without network connectivity it doesn't work out so well. I think that one solution to this is the mailing list that I alluded to above - email is a wonderful asynchronous communication mechanism, add to that that many of us have smartphones that can send and receive mail even when we have no other form of connectivity (IRC from a smartphone is just painful :D)
At any rate, I'm looking forward to the FAD so that we can discuss these and lots of other interesting and exciting topics!
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I think that some of the issues were related to communications failure, though - there was plenty of confusion at the hotel about exactly what time we were supposed to be at the venue, therefore, lots of people showed up late. I'm not sure what exactly can be done about this - post signs at the hotel explaining when folks need to be there? A fudcon-attendees mailing list? These are just a few of the options to consider, I'm certainly open to other ones.
Also, not a slight at the location, but having to take mass transit that only comes once every 15 minutes or so is guaranteed to create issues - the bus was simply not designed to carry THAT many people getting on at the same time. All of the other times at FUDCon that I can recall, the venue was within easy walking distance of the hotel, a definite plus (come to think of it. I'm not sure that was the case at my very first FUDCon - 2008 in Raleigh).
Another thing that we need to deal with is the inevitable fail that comes with putting lots of geeks in a single hotel - the network will be absolutely useless - we need to just accept the fact that at the hotel, we'll have no connectivity to the outside world. We've seen this time and time again, yet we still don't have a way to deal with it and still communicate. I think that while IRC is a wonderful medium of communication, without network connectivity it doesn't work out so well. I think that one solution to this is the mailing list that I alluded to above - email is a wonderful asynchronous communication mechanism, add to that that many of us have smartphones that can send and receive mail even when we have no other form of connectivity (IRC from a smartphone is just painful :D)
At any rate, I'm looking forward to the FAD so that we can discuss these and lots of other interesting and exciting topics!
And here I was so happy to be at a place where transit showed up every 15 minutes (versus 30-60 minutes as most places outside of Boston and New York City). Heck in NC I was happy that I only had twice a day...
The networking issue is a common one I have found at geek conferences... even ones with extra network gear installed. Splitting people up in hotels can work a bit... but get too many and you can actually shut down neighboring hotels also.
The laptops become their own DOS as they swamp various points. The best thing I have found is bringing extra hubs and getting as much people off wireless as possible.