[EuroPython] List of things that need doing

[Jacob Hallén]

On måndag 04 april 2005 19:46, Dario Lopez-Kästen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I send some observations by mail instead of wainting until tomorrow to
> discuss them. IRC meetings tend to be qquite chaotic in spite of
> everyones efforts to make them efficient, so I figured we can start the
> discussion a priori.
>
> Here goes:
>
> Jacob Hallén wrote:
> > Internet access
> > - Internet access last year was inadequate. We would like to plug in
> >   a couple more access points, so that there is coverage in all the
> >   lecture halls, and in the cafeteria. This needs to be negotiated with
> >   Chalmers Nätgrupp.
>
> I need lots of details of what went wrong, in what rooms coverage was
> not adequate, and as much info as possible of this. There is very very
> little space for improvement for the coverage, and I am bit uncertain as
> to how much of a problem there actually were: I've heard from people
> that were suprised at how smooth and working it was to rumours of people
> not being happy with it. In short I need to have concrete descriptions
> of what was unsatisfactiry in order to be able to negotiate.
>
> For instance, the cafeteria is definitely hard to get internet access to
> because it is a) placed in an area not covered by radio and b) there are
> no possiblities of doing cabled connection.
>
> I also would like to point out that bringing one's own equipment and
> expecting it to work will probably fail this year, due to the kind of
> security framework used in the network access area. You are welcome to
> try and see if it works, but the available connections with the wall
> mounted ethernet sockets in the Arkitekture Light Garden are not
> designed to nor supposed to work with hubs and switches - only with
> single computers.
>
> I will bring it up with the network group and see what we can expect,
> but do not expect too much from the free internet access we have.
>
> I have allready asked about better coverage in some of the lecture
> halls, and depending on equipment avilability, we *may* get better
> coverage in some areas. This is a possibility, not a promise.

Coverage was especially bad in VR, though I think there were some complaints 
about parts of VM as well. We may expect coverage to be bad in both VA and 
VB, since they are further away from the access point, with several walls in 
between.

If there is a switch close to the existing access point, it would be rather 
simple to set up a couple of temporary extra access points. We can buy 2 
access points and 2 100-meter ethernet cables, so we can distribute the 
access out to the places where it is most needed.

Also, there were quite a few people who complained about there being no place 
to go to if you needed wired access. This is probably going to be less of a 
problem this year, but after seeing that there were still qute a few people 
who used wired access at Pycon, I can see that many people are still 
dependent on wired connections.

In any case, we should have a few wireless cards avalable for people to borrow 
this year. We have some left from last year, and we can buy a few new ones.

>  > - We also need to get accounts created for all attendees, including
>  >   accounts for on-site registrants.
>
> did this work allright last year? (all accounts where prefabricated by
> the network group). If not, what needs to be improved?

From my perspective, it worked excellently. The one thing we need to make sure 
is that we have a surplus of accounts, for the people who manage to lose 
theirs and the ones who register on-site. We should print separate slips for 
these before the conference, so that we have them ready when they are needed. 
Last year we had to cannibalise the accounts of people who never showed up.
It worked, but we ran the risk of people showing up late and having their 
accounts gone.

There were only a few people who complained about having authenticated login 
to access the network. I think we can just ignore those complaints, since I 
think it is unreasonable to expect an unauthenticated service.

Jacob