ETECH meta-thoughts:
- It’d be interesting to count notebooks (win/*nix/os x/paper), do breakdowns; there’s much more that could be done w/ this, but a lot are probably pretty invasive, privacy wise
- Conference Tools
- Traffic Shaping – understandable that bandwidth is limited, but for the love of god, a T1 is more than good enough to guarantee everyone at least 1Kbps of decent QoS
- Squid proxy – wow, this would really reduce traffic, right?
- SSH Tunnels – while you have your busybox installed doing traffic shaping, it might be nice to provide stunnels or VPN as a courtesy
- Password Sniffer/Alert – even w/ providing encryption, there should be sniffing bot that will sniff for unencrypted passwords, and then alert (via private email would probably be the best way, along w/ a blurb on how to use the stunnel; registering MAC address of your machine and your email ddress at registration; public posting would probably not be a good idea)
- local EtherPEG – would be interesting to project somewhere; also, you can do analytics like tracking traffic per room to figure out which sessions are boring
- local wiki – probably also a distinction between internal/external authors, possibly even spaces, like an internal notes session
- local IRC – there should be a separate channel for each room/session. there should also be logged and notlogged rooms; you can be sure the former will have less noise (also, the logbot should probably respont to a per/line !log prepend); there should be a chumpbot. hecklebot or other way of using back/side-channels, maybe. possibly make rooms to track presence, but that’s probably confusing – and there’s a better way:
- RFID conference pass – a way to track presence, and here’s a way to do it while maintaining privacy. Stick on a random RFID tag at registration (from a single large bowl) at registration. Now, have a kiosk where they can register the tag w/ their preferences (say linking their name/contact info, and then whether they want to make their location known, and in what contexts). Put scanners at the doorways to track ins/outs. collect interesting stats
- Session whuffie – this may be as simple as a ++/– to a votebot; alternatively a web button on the wiki; one vote per person of course