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