cckweiss@castor (08/13/90)
I'm part of a committee charged with devising an electronic event for the next California Association of Academic Computing conference, this spring, at U.C. Davis. I thought the participants in this group might have some ideas to contribute. The audience for this conference is mostly community college and Cal State faculty, and most have little or no exposure to Internet, Usenet or wide area networking in general. We are trying to come up with a way of showing these people the power of a network, and send them away enthused about the idea of getting these services at their own campus. We should have the resources to install at least 50 active terminals in a central location, and we can provide some basic training in things like FTP and e-mail prior to the event. There will be about 200 participants, so a hands-on exercise will have to be a team effort. We also have a local fiber optic network, so we could put on a demonstration of the 'network of the future', showing off broad bandwidth services that are not possible on a wide area network today. One thought that's been discussed is a 'network scavenger hunt'. We could seed some FTP sites with clues, and have some people on the network available for the two hour duration of this event to answer e-mail immediately. Then we turn teams of conference participants loose in the net to find the info, solve the puzzle, or whatever. We can probably even get a vendor to donate valuable prizes (insert fanfare)!. So, any great ideas out there? Thanks for your time, and I hope this didn't raise the S/N ratio of your group too much! Ken Weiss cckweiss@castor.ucdavis.edu .