Wikimania 2009/Tech post-mortem notes

Some quick notes of the top of my head from this years' experience... --brion 19:14, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Network[edit]

Reliable wireless internet is key. We had some problems this year with the network being very flaky at times.
- Note that when it did work it was nicely quick. Impression I got was that local-net issues like DHCP are often the problem, not the upstream route.
  That's right; we had problems with DHCP negotiation, which was solved with Roaming. MarianoC 16:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Have some DVI->VGA adapters ready. Of course it's those Mac fanboys' own fault for not having them, but the fact is there's a lot of them :) --Catrope 19:17, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- And Mini-DVI->VGA and Mini-DisplayPort->VGA. Dang Apple!

I recommend recording projector images more directly if possible; an ideal presentation video would be able to include a high-quality screen image.
- (Have seen this suggestion several times. My primary worry is that if someone has to edit between the talking-head and the screen it'll take lots of work, and if they just show the screen it can be boring.)
  - [Another possibility is to graft the two side-by-side to make an extra-wide video with both.]
Make sure audio/microphone issues are dealt with :)
- Sometimes audience questions were not recorded well in particular.
Have a video upload space and workflow prepped ahead of time; we whipped something together at the last minute during the conference and got videos up within a couple days, but it'd be even better if we can have them up almost immediately! :)
record also simultaneous translations (if there are any) and offer them as an alternative audio track

This year we had some nice international power adapters in the tech space, and the rooms had plenty of power points. Good to see this continue next year :) Werdna 19:20, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

the hacking days could be slightly better organized. I felt the Berlin event a good level of organizational structure. Everyone put stuff they are interested in talking about on note cards. We put up and group the note cards, set times and meet. While just having everyone in the room "talk to whoever they needed to talk to" was productive in many ways, I think dedicated times for dedicated topics is useful and there is no reason you can't include both. Mdale 19:23, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Definitely agree that a little more structure at the start will help. Some folks were fine just diving in without that, but I know others felt pretty lost. --brion 22:07, 21 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]