Comments on: IBM Lotusphere 2009 Highlights

By: E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez » Enterprise 2.0 Conference Highlights – A Proposal for DIA

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:08:32 +0000

[...] to give you an idea of the kind of frustration that permeated throughout the entire event. Once again, and this is not the first, nor the second time, that the wi-fi at a large technical conference [...]

By: E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez » IBM Lotusphere 2009 Highlights - We Can Work Smarter, Together

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:19:17 +0000

[...] I have mentioned in a previous blog post, over the course of the next few weeks, I will be putting together a number of entries, a [...]

By: Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:09:05 +0000

LOL! Yeah, specially if that guy called Luis Suarez wouldn’t have talked so much all along throughout the hour! LOL!

Seriously, Stu, I had a great time and look forward to the next time we meet up in person!

By: Stuart McIntyre

Stuart McIntyre — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:47:51 +0000

Martijn, so glad you enjoyed the session. I thought we had some really interesting discussions on the day and could really have filled a 2 hour slot without any problems.

By: Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:43:05 +0000

Hi Martijn! Thanks for dropping by! Greatly appreciated your kind feedback and glad you enjoyed the session!

Oh, right, so that’s what it was! I was at the wrong hotel! I mean, all of the action happened at the Dolphin, except for the sessions, so I guess it makes sense! The Swan quietly provided the quality of service that’s expected. I guess I know now where I am going to stay next year!! W00t!

Thanks again and look forward to the next time we can meet up again! Have a good one!

By: Martijn de Jong

Martijn de Jong — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:52:58 +0000

Hi Luis,
It was really good catching up with you during Lotusphere. The BoF session you, Stuart & other Luis did was one of the highlights for me of this year’s Lotusphere.
Regarding the Wifi connection, I think if you would have made the fountain in the Swan your regular spot instead of the one in the Dolphin, you would have had a much better conference in terms of connectivity. I too had problems in the Dolphin, though definitely not always. In the Swan, where I had most of the sessions I attended, Wifi connection was consistently good.

By: Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:32:05 +0000

Hi Stu! It was wonderful being able to see you F2F again and catch up offline with several conversations. Really delighted we had the chance to meet up and share some further thoughts on the conference event and whatever else!

It was a real pleasure and an honour for me to participate in your BOFs session, and I do hope the feedback from the event was good, too! I think we had some really good conversations and certainly the interest was really exciting to watch! Well done!

RE: WiFi, I can imagine how those folks may have been working really hard to get things going, but I am afraid that for those of us on the back we still struggled with getting connected. And like I said, this was not just for the OGS, but throughout the entire event, in multiple rooms, and in the open areas. Somehow I felt like the overload was continuous and given as well the relevance of other external events and how folks wanted to catch up with those, I guess I was expecting to have a bit more robustness on the overall connection. Yet, it didn’t happen.

I am hoping we may have learned the lessons for next year and hope to be present again at another superb event where the connection was just as good as the overall event. Fingers crossed!

Thanks again for the feedback, folks, and for dropping by!

By: Luis Suarez

Luis Suarez — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:26:47 +0000

Thanks, Ed, for the follow up. Yes, I can imagine how all of those different devices are creating the problem for all of us to be connected and everything and thinking that even though the solution may not be that clear just yet, I think we should try. Perhaps with a couple of items:

- First introduce standard regular Ethernet lines that could be shared across the various rooms. A combination of both wi-fi and Ethernet could certainly help with load balancing the multiple devices and I can imagine it would be rather helpful.

- Another option would be to provide a specific channel for those folks who would want to blog, live tweet the event, so that they would have the opportunity to enjoy that connectivity while they are reporting the highlights of the event.

- Third, help attendees understand the issue of the wi-fi and encourage them to please use one single device and refrain from using others. Mutual understanding can go really far if we all collaborate on it.

I am sure there are plenty of other options, for sure, but I think we would need to ensure these items are covered in future events to avoid further frustrations with potential attendees. I know, not easy to circumvent, I am sure, but I think we should be trying harder for next year. It’s the least we could do if we would want to have some decent coverage.

By: Stuart McIntyre

Stuart McIntyre — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:44:50 +0000

Hey Luis – great to meet you again F-to-F at LS09. The conversations we shared in the Dolphin lobby were one of the highlights of my week, and it was a real honour to have you present at my BoF.

Re: WiFi. I was at the front of the OGS and it was very obvious how much effort the Techies were putting in trying to resolve the Wifi problems – I think the demand clearly astonished them.

For me it improved noticeably from Tuesday onwards, I’m surprised you did see that as well…

By: Ed Brill

Ed Brill — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:52:25 +0000

I’m not an expert (probably some of your readers are) but from what I’ve read about the 802.11 protocols, there comes a point of congestion/saturation which is difficult or impossible to resolve. When you put thousands of such devices in the small space of a ballroom, there may actually be no answer. I think the frequencies can be more distributed across various channels, but ultimately if one geek holds 2-3 devices that emit wifi, all jabbering away their packets at once on the same frequencies, you hit a limit. This is why I was able at one point, for example, to run from a session room to one of the hardware connection locations and successfully replicate (quite quickly, I might add) where wifi was useless.

I’ve always been a 10BaseT fan and find wifi to be too tenuous for my own comfort, though I rely on it constantly in my daily work. It seems like it should be far more reliable and easier to manage than it is.