Going Solo

We will have power outlets. We will have wifi.

One word of caution, however:

• the power outlets are Swiss — not European, Swiss
• we have one wifi base station and lots of bandwidth, which should be fine — but please be gentle.

Some details.

Swiss power outlets look like European ones: two round holes. But they’re slightly smaller holes than some (if not most) European outlets. Bring an adaptor.

We’ll try to put outlets all over the place in the main hall, so there should be plenty for everyone.

Conference wifi is one long painful topic. I’ve given a hard time to more than one conference organizer for their flakey wifi, so I’m quite prepared for a return of justice and you lot giving me a hard time if things go wrong. However, I’ve seen the numbers of the setup Swisscom is providing us, and I think we’ll be just fine. I’d like to remind you, though, of some “play nice” practices for conference wifi:

• quit Skype: yes, I know many of you are addicted to Skype group chats — but Skype is P2P and with lovely conference bandwidth available, chances are the network might pick you as a supernode, routing a whole lot of traffic through your little computer — and the conference broadband. Use the IRC backchannel instead (download mIRC for Windows or Colloquy for OSX if you’re not set up for IRC yet).
• don’t use P2P: Going Solo is not the day to download music, videos, or start torrenting — there are way more interesting things to do there!
• keep your bandwidth usage conference-related: feel free to upload photos and videos of the conference, but catch up on your general Flickr upload backlog or surf YouTube from your hotel room or at some other time, thanks.
• blogs and e-mail are fine: these are not bandwidth-heavy activities, so go ahead (we hope you’ll find the programme compelling enough to leave your inbox alone for a few hours, though ;-))
• if things flake out, wait: if you can’t get on the wifi, or the internet access seems clogged, give it a few minutes before trying again.

Thanks for your help!

There have been a few questions on Twitter, so here’s some information for the Big Day.

First of all, aside from Sébastien who will be filming and uploading the talks, Charbax who will be conducting video interviews, and Ernst-Jan who will be live-blogging for The Next Web blog, Swiss podcaster Thierry Weber of Culture Pod will also be present with his camera to report on the event.

And then, there are all of you, the people formerly known as the audience ;-), Going Solo attendees, bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, photographers or reporters in your own right. You are most welcome to blog, photograph, record, sketch all the happenings of the day. We’ll do our best to keep track of everything that pops on our radar, but you can help us by:

• tagging your various productions goingsolo
• sending a tweet @goingsolo with the link or an e-mail to steph at going hyphen solo dot net

We encourage you to use a Creative Commons license, by-nc-sa for example, but of course you’re free to do what you want with your work. If you produce video material, we’d be really happy to be able to include it on the official Going Solo DailyMotion page (with a link to the original, of course), if you’ll let us.

As far as the backchannel is concerned, Twitter is of course the place to go (use @goingsolo in front of your message if you want to make sure we see it). If you don’t have an account yet, open one now!

There will be folks hanging out in channel #goingsolo on the Freenode IRC network, too. I’m already there - come on in.

Update: if you’re on Twitter, join the Going Solo community on SixGroups. Give them your Twitter name and @sixgroups will start following you. Any of your updates using the hashtag #goingsolo will appear in the SixGroups livestream.