"The reverse side" of the Technology Forum 2012: how it works
On April 24, the Mail.ru Technologies Forum ended - one of the largest events in Russia for specialists in the field of Web technologies.
As a result of the autumn Forum, I talked about how this event was prepared, what problems we faced and how they were solved. Continuing the tradition, I will talk about the “seamy side” of the just-held April Forum. What have we done this year?
First, they became bigger and our Forum became bigger. Now it will be held twice as often in spring and autumn.
Secondly, this year we decided to dedicate the Spring Forum to a rather narrow topic - the exploitation of web solutions. The difficulty was that one specialized community of system administrators, comparable in scale to Habr for web developers or with RSDN for general programmers, cannot be found in RuNet. Attempts to organize something large, where some experts would share with others offline on purely admin topics, of course, were. RootConf as a separate event rested in the Bose in 2009, and the Meeting of Sysadmins near Kaluga with tents, beer, crossed-out kettles and barbecues, for all its greatness and usefulness, is still something different.
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At many conferences, the badges play an almost decorative role. Of course, without the logo and / or the name of the conference / sponsors / partners and the name / surname of the speaker, no one did it, but quite often everything is limited to this. We decided to study this issue more closely and make a really convenient and functional badge.
We abandoned the central fastener of the ribbon, as was done last year. "Field tests" showed that when fastening from above at one point, the badge rotates, and because of this, it is printed the same on both sides. The forum badges are made with attachments at two points, which is why the badge does not spin, and the inner side can be used more intelligently.
From the inside we had the opportunity to place something useful. Not further, as on RIF, one of my acquaintances shared the convenience of a badge as carrying for a cell phone. At the Technology Forum, our badge was no less functional: we put ten business cards in one inner pocket, and a mini-program of the event in the other.
Thirdly, each badge carried information about the position, company and type of activity. In addition to the clearly designated position, the color of the badge was reported, the sysadmin was in front of you, the manager or IT specialist of some other profile.
We also used a convenient method of electronic acquaintance at the conference: it is worth counting the QR code placed on the inside of the badge of your new friend, and his contact details will be automatically added to the Address Book of the smartphone. To create a VCard-QR there are special web services , you can also use libraries for PHP (for example, PHP QR-Code )
In each badge invested compact mini-program. Unlike the larger “older sister,” this one was always at hand — in a badge or in a pocket. Again, the “field tests” showed that it is more convenient than every time pulling out a large, albeit detailed program from a backpack.
Such “complex” badges were prepared by a sufficient number of those who passed the preliminary registration and confirmed their participation in the Forum.
At the same time, we tested the mechanism of printing badges / business cards on the spot. Despite the fact that we wrote everywhere about the necessity of pre-registration, quite a lot of people came without it, and we could not leave these people with handwritten badges.
Next time we plan to significantly increase the registration at "rush hour". We didn’t expect that more than 400 people would come at once half an hour before the start - almost twice as many as at the same time last year. The available areas at the entrance to Infospace did not allow for efficiently organizing such a flow of people, but nevertheless we managed: around ten o'clock in the morning everyone who wanted had already taken their places in the halls and with a small theatrical delay of 10 minutes - so that those who had just entered could drink a sip of coffee - we started.
Last year, I told you that the practice of displaying photos on photo hosting sites in real time was well recommended. It is very convenient for the press - it receives photos immediately from the network, and even more conveniently for the visitors themselves - many of them publish photos in social networks.
Of course, it was not without experiments. Photos from the event at the April Forum were published in real time simultaneously in two social networks - MyWorld and Facebook. For this we have written a special module, which we plan to expand with new social networks and features in the future. There are also ready-made tools - for the same Facebook for automated publication of statuses and photos, you can use the console application FBCMD , for the development of which the language PHP is chosen. However, setup and use are extremely simple.
Let me remind you how we organized a photo shoot. As far as I know, there is no such scheme at any conference. Several photographers work at the event, the photo is instantly transferred to the server, where the partial publication on the social network comes from, and the photo is paired in parallel with the frame with the Forum logo and the result is sent to Fujifilm color photo printers. As a result, an hour after the start of the Forum, the board on which the photographs were hung attracted the attention of a large selection of photographs. Many of the visitors took prints with them. At the opposite end of the hall there was a large television set on which photos were displayed in real time.
As a result, at the end of the day we had 1350 photos. Most of them were available online during the day.
This year we also made video broadcasting more functional than last time. The broadcast went into four streams, of which two showed halls (with mixing of presentations and titles), and two showed laptop screens where presentations were launched. Anyone could at any time "rewind" the broadcast back to start listening to the report not from the current moment, but from the beginning.
Thus, the recorded video reports were saved on the site in real time. The other day we will publish the video, cut according to reports, together with the source code of the presentations. This work requires special video processing, so it takes time, but the site already on the day of the Forum provided and still presents the opportunity to listen to and view any report from two halls.
This year we also had captions and video savers, switching plans from the near to the far, shooting in the hall. We have accumulated more than fifty hours of video, much will be published in separate posts along with the decoding.
By the next Forum, we are planning a small revolution in terms of simultaneous translation. For the second year we have been confronted with the problems of interfacing audio "synchronists" with video broadcasting equipment, due to which many reports with translation came with poor sound quality. The quality of the translation itself will be significantly improved.
In the hall, a video was broadcast from one of the halls. To switch between the first and second halls, I had a special web application on the iPhone, containing two buttons, “Hall 1” and “Hall 2”. They allowed in real time to change the broadcast room on the big screen from any place with the Internet. This was due to the fact that switching from one hall to another needed to be done exactly at the moment of changing the speakers, and this is literally a minute or two, and it was required to switch from anywhere in the conference center.
The forum was visited by about 1,100 people. It is already obvious that "Infospace" with great difficulty copes with such volumes at peak times - at the time of opening and at lunchtime. By the next Forum, we will definitely solve this problem.
In the last "seamy side" I wrote that in order to predict the turnout, we previously phoned all registered. Interestingly, the share of those who confirmed their intention to visit the Forum and refused to repeat the data from last year with an accuracy of one percent - 77% confirmed and 7% refused
During registration, we were asked to choose which group the Forum participant would consider to be.
In the group of system administrators, we identified everyone who chose “I administer web servers” or “I administer Linux / * BSD” or “I administer networks”. These turned out to be 45%, that is, almost half of those registered and who came to the Forum.
The group of managers includes all those who have chosen “I am an IT manager”. Such turned out to be 15%.
The forum was attended by about a hundred university students, many of whom have already worked in the specialty.
And finally - a pleasant surprise. At the Forum, we had about 80 girls, of which more than a third were specialized specialists in the field of system administration. And you say - men's work!
Rauf Aliyev,
Director of Research and Education Mail.Ru Group
Photo compilation - in Facebook (favorites) and in My world .
Some other reports from the Technology Forum, where more about the content of the conference:
As a result of the autumn Forum, I talked about how this event was prepared, what problems we faced and how they were solved. Continuing the tradition, I will talk about the “seamy side” of the just-held April Forum. What have we done this year?First, they became bigger and our Forum became bigger. Now it will be held twice as often in spring and autumn.
Secondly, this year we decided to dedicate the Spring Forum to a rather narrow topic - the exploitation of web solutions. The difficulty was that one specialized community of system administrators, comparable in scale to Habr for web developers or with RSDN for general programmers, cannot be found in RuNet. Attempts to organize something large, where some experts would share with others offline on purely admin topics, of course, were. RootConf as a separate event rested in the Bose in 2009, and the Meeting of Sysadmins near Kaluga with tents, beer, crossed-out kettles and barbecues, for all its greatness and usefulness, is still something different.
')
REGISTRATION, BADGES
At many conferences, the badges play an almost decorative role. Of course, without the logo and / or the name of the conference / sponsors / partners and the name / surname of the speaker, no one did it, but quite often everything is limited to this. We decided to study this issue more closely and make a really convenient and functional badge.
We abandoned the central fastener of the ribbon, as was done last year. "Field tests" showed that when fastening from above at one point, the badge rotates, and because of this, it is printed the same on both sides. The forum badges are made with attachments at two points, which is why the badge does not spin, and the inner side can be used more intelligently.
From the inside we had the opportunity to place something useful. Not further, as on RIF, one of my acquaintances shared the convenience of a badge as carrying for a cell phone. At the Technology Forum, our badge was no less functional: we put ten business cards in one inner pocket, and a mini-program of the event in the other.
Thirdly, each badge carried information about the position, company and type of activity. In addition to the clearly designated position, the color of the badge was reported, the sysadmin was in front of you, the manager or IT specialist of some other profile.
We also used a convenient method of electronic acquaintance at the conference: it is worth counting the QR code placed on the inside of the badge of your new friend, and his contact details will be automatically added to the Address Book of the smartphone. To create a VCard-QR there are special web services , you can also use libraries for PHP (for example, PHP QR-Code )
In each badge invested compact mini-program. Unlike the larger “older sister,” this one was always at hand — in a badge or in a pocket. Again, the “field tests” showed that it is more convenient than every time pulling out a large, albeit detailed program from a backpack.
Such “complex” badges were prepared by a sufficient number of those who passed the preliminary registration and confirmed their participation in the Forum.
At the same time, we tested the mechanism of printing badges / business cards on the spot. Despite the fact that we wrote everywhere about the necessity of pre-registration, quite a lot of people came without it, and we could not leave these people with handwritten badges.
Next time we plan to significantly increase the registration at "rush hour". We didn’t expect that more than 400 people would come at once half an hour before the start - almost twice as many as at the same time last year. The available areas at the entrance to Infospace did not allow for efficiently organizing such a flow of people, but nevertheless we managed: around ten o'clock in the morning everyone who wanted had already taken their places in the halls and with a small theatrical delay of 10 minutes - so that those who had just entered could drink a sip of coffee - we started.
PHOTO TRANSFER
Last year, I told you that the practice of displaying photos on photo hosting sites in real time was well recommended. It is very convenient for the press - it receives photos immediately from the network, and even more conveniently for the visitors themselves - many of them publish photos in social networks.
Of course, it was not without experiments. Photos from the event at the April Forum were published in real time simultaneously in two social networks - MyWorld and Facebook. For this we have written a special module, which we plan to expand with new social networks and features in the future. There are also ready-made tools - for the same Facebook for automated publication of statuses and photos, you can use the console application FBCMD , for the development of which the language PHP is chosen. However, setup and use are extremely simple.
Technical deviation : in the process of testing, the evil bug on Facebook was discovered, which has not been fixed, and about which there is not a word anywhere on the net. As you know, uploading more than 200 photos to the Facebook album via the web interface does not allow. But for external applications, you can download a whole thousand ( doc ). However, after overcoming the threshold of 400 photos, a strange thing happens: there is a photo in the album, but all the photos deeper than the 200th in the preview list are missing, although they are all available through a direct link. For some reason, the list with thumbnails cannot be more than two pages with 200 photos each (4 columns with 50 photos). In brackets after the album name, the actual number of photos is indicated, but only 400 of them can be viewed. At the same time, it turned out that the functions of group deleting or transferring photos from an album to an album are not as a class. So as a photo hosting Facebook is far from perfect.
Let me remind you how we organized a photo shoot. As far as I know, there is no such scheme at any conference. Several photographers work at the event, the photo is instantly transferred to the server, where the partial publication on the social network comes from, and the photo is paired in parallel with the frame with the Forum logo and the result is sent to Fujifilm color photo printers. As a result, an hour after the start of the Forum, the board on which the photographs were hung attracted the attention of a large selection of photographs. Many of the visitors took prints with them. At the opposite end of the hall there was a large television set on which photos were displayed in real time.
Technical retreat . The organization of printing from the web to a local printer is solved as follows: a web server is picked up on a local PC, a page is uploaded from the server, delivering new photos via a POST to a local script, a local script starts printing to the default printer. Most often, due to driver problems, the local server runs under Windows, so the program that prints the image should be written as a Windows application. You can write yourself (we did this in Svyaznoy for the terminal so that checks are printed), you can use ready-made software. In particular, a free IrfanView package can print from the command line.i_view32 ___ /print
For Linux, everything is easier, run from a scriptlpr -o landscape -o fit-to-page -o media=A4 _
As a result, at the end of the day we had 1350 photos. Most of them were available online during the day.
VIDEO BROADCAST
This year we also made video broadcasting more functional than last time. The broadcast went into four streams, of which two showed halls (with mixing of presentations and titles), and two showed laptop screens where presentations were launched. Anyone could at any time "rewind" the broadcast back to start listening to the report not from the current moment, but from the beginning.
As a broadcast server, as in the past year, we used the Wowza Media Server. From the laptop screen was broadcast through the Adobe Flash Media Encoder. During the setup process, we encountered an unexpected problem - when connecting external plasma panels (16: 9) via a VGA splitter in screen duplication, the aspect ratio of the laptop itself changed to 4: 3, and this only happened with one 100 inch plasma panel and only when connected via a splitter. It turned out, either we are left without one (central) panel and everything else will be fine, or the central panel will work, but a flattened laptop screen will be broadcast to the network. The output was original - if you connect this plasma panel to the splitter last, when the laptop has already switched to the screen duplication mode, then the laptop does not notice anything and the screen is not flattened. Connecting via HDMI is still trickier. On my performance on RIFE with an Apple MacBook, the image was not broadcast on the plasma panel for more than one second. Thank God, the presentation was on PowerPoint and was successfully launched on Windows, but it took about five minutes for the restructuring. The problem was that Apple’s MacBook chipset includes HDCP copy protection. Many HDMI splitters and projectors are not included in the Apple approved list and broadcast to an external screen via HDMI will not work at all, while VGA always works. the details
Thus, the recorded video reports were saved on the site in real time. The other day we will publish the video, cut according to reports, together with the source code of the presentations. This work requires special video processing, so it takes time, but the site already on the day of the Forum provided and still presents the opportunity to listen to and view any report from two halls.
This year we also had captions and video savers, switching plans from the near to the far, shooting in the hall. We have accumulated more than fifty hours of video, much will be published in separate posts along with the decoding.
By the next Forum, we are planning a small revolution in terms of simultaneous translation. For the second year we have been confronted with the problems of interfacing audio "synchronists" with video broadcasting equipment, due to which many reports with translation came with poor sound quality. The quality of the translation itself will be significantly improved.
In the hall, a video was broadcast from one of the halls. To switch between the first and second halls, I had a special web application on the iPhone, containing two buttons, “Hall 1” and “Hall 2”. They allowed in real time to change the broadcast room on the big screen from any place with the Internet. This was due to the fact that switching from one hall to another needed to be done exactly at the moment of changing the speakers, and this is literally a minute or two, and it was required to switch from anywhere in the conference center.
SOME STATISTICS
The forum was visited by about 1,100 people. It is already obvious that "Infospace" with great difficulty copes with such volumes at peak times - at the time of opening and at lunchtime. By the next Forum, we will definitely solve this problem.
In the last "seamy side" I wrote that in order to predict the turnout, we previously phoned all registered. Interestingly, the share of those who confirmed their intention to visit the Forum and refused to repeat the data from last year with an accuracy of one percent - 77% confirmed and 7% refusedDuring registration, we were asked to choose which group the Forum participant would consider to be.
In the group of system administrators, we identified everyone who chose “I administer web servers” or “I administer Linux / * BSD” or “I administer networks”. These turned out to be 45%, that is, almost half of those registered and who came to the Forum.
The group of managers includes all those who have chosen “I am an IT manager”. Such turned out to be 15%.
The forum was attended by about a hundred university students, many of whom have already worked in the specialty.
And finally - a pleasant surprise. At the Forum, we had about 80 girls, of which more than a third were specialized specialists in the field of system administration. And you say - men's work!
Rauf Aliyev,
Director of Research and Education Mail.Ru Group
Photo compilation - in Facebook (favorites) and in My world .
Some other reports from the Technology Forum, where more about the content of the conference:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/143433/
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