[comp.society] Ideas for a network event?

krweiss@ucdavis.edu (Ken Weiss) (08/09/90)

I'm part of a committee charged with devising an 'electronic event' for
the Spring 1991 California Association for Academic Computing
conference. The theme of this year's conference is networking. It struck
me that the participants in this group might be a good source of ideas
for the event.
 
The structure of the program is as follows: We have a two hour block of
time on the second day of this two day conference to show about 200
people the power of a network connection. We can set up a mandatory
workshop on the first day, to teach the basics of logging on to a
computer, accessing a network, sending and receiving mail, and using
anonymous FTP. I don't think we can find 200 PC's, Mac's and terminals
to allow every individual their own private connection, but for a
hands-on kind of thing we can break the group into a smaller number of
teams.
 
The audience for this conference is mostly community college and Cal
State faculty. Most of the conferees will have little or no knowledge of
or exposure to Internet, or any other wide area network.
 
Thus far, we've come up with two ideas. The first is a kind of
electronic scavenger hunt. We'll create a 'network within the network'
of volunteers who agree to stay at their terminals during the two hour
period of the event and answer their mail immediately. While this won't
give us real time response, it will get us a lot closer than the usual
communication lags. To structure the event, we will get a vendor to
donate some prizes. The participants are given a starting point in the
network - maybe an FTP site from which they must retrieve a file,
leading them to the next step, and so forth. The first person/team to
find all the hidden clues wins the goodies, and everyone gets an
introduction to the network.
 
The second idea is more of a demonstration than a participatory event.
For this, we'd use our local fiber optic cables and create a pseudo-WAN
(you remember pseudo-WAN, Obi-WAN's Greek cousin) to give people an idea
of what the network might look like in the future, when more bandwidth
is available.
 
So, networkers, what do you think? Anyone got a pet idea for some really
nifty network event that's just waiting for an opportunity to implement?
Any comments on the ideas we've got so far? What I'm after is something
that will leave the participants with the same dazed feeling I had the
first time I used Internet in a motivated attempt to find specific
information. I was absolutely blown away by the quantity, quality and
timeliness of the material I was able to find. I sat here in my spare
bedroom in front of my Mac, shaking my head and wondering how I would
have generated this information without a network connection.
 
Thanks for your time. I'm looking forward to seeing what the people who
use Internet think would make a good demonstration of the power of
Internet.
 
Ken Weiss