What I Did This Summer
by Phil Howard, July 2003

This summer I organized a conference.  

All in all it went well, and at least the website looks decent:
http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/it4d/.
I have become very lazy with web design, resigning myself to Microsoft Word,
so this is nice and text heavy and full of macro code.

The workshop was cohosted by Wolfson College at Oxford.  While a prestigious
place to organize an event, I correctly anticipated that the Oxford College
system would make things difficult to organize.  I planned to go out almost
two months in advance, knowing that Oxford has had more than half a
millennia developing traditions and bureaucracies to help some things happen
and prevent other things from happening.  A guy who teaches history there
said that the structure of most Oxford Colleges really was Byzantine,
because they were founded at a time when the role model was that empire's
bureaucracy (Rome collapsed before Constantinople).

Organizing the catering was particularly fun.  A number of Oxford colleges
have their own wineries and their own flocks and herds on their own farm
estates.  For lunch menu the college kitchen offered me deer, ox, quail,
salmon, lamb, guinea fowl, chicken, roast rump of beef and pork on a spit.
I jokingly asked if they could roast a peasant farmer and they said they
would have to think about it.

Initially they had no vegetarian option, and since most of my workshop
participants would be hippy third-world development folk I was pretty sure
they would want a vegetarian option.  When I asked about the possibilities
the cook asked if he could think about it for a couple of days and then came
back with the option "how about a cooked pepper, stuffed with something like
rice?"  I was advised not to push for something more complex so ordered a
couple of peppers stuffed with something like rice and several dozen salmon
dishes.

Unfortunately the salmon came wrapped in an Italian ham called pancetta, and
when the kitchen typed up the menu for the day Microsoft Word corrected the
lunch as 'salmon wrapped in placenta'.  For my 3 non-pork eaters I had to go
into the kitchen and specifically remove the placenta.

But I was grateful that any food at all arrived on the magic day.  I arrived
early on the day of the workshop to start setting up.  There were two guys
working in the kitchen, both recently hired, and both unaware that any
conference was going on.  They had no where the coffee equipment was, no
idea where the coffee was, and no idea how to make the coffee.  One of my
colleagues broke into the cabinets and made coffee while conference
participants started collecting for the day.

The college booked me into their main conference room, a room with no
Internet access.  I had requested a room with Internet access, and the
college administrators knew that this was a workshop about using information
technologies for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and peacekeeping
logistics.  The rooms next door had Internet access, and so did the rooms
above and below.  Luckily I caught this one a full two weeks before the
conference date.  Unfortunately the college employs two tech support dudes,
neither of whom seemed to work Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays.
And one of them volunteered as the Magistrate of a local township, so he
took every second Friday off.  They made me register my request for internet
access with the college IT request-tracking website, and they gave me a
request record number to use in all of my email correspondence with them,
but they never actually wrote me back.  They day before the workshop someone
added my computer's MAC number to their list of approved computers so that I
could get online through their secured network.

Now that it is over I'm happy with how it came together.  A lot of these
kinds of conferences have a cross section of the same people at the same
level across multiple international institutions.  For this one we managed
to get some very senior World Bank/OECD/UN folk who probably would not have
come if they'd really looked at the guest list, and a bunch of people from
developing countries who should have been proud of their cool new media
projects but who actually felt a out of place among too many suits.  Given
that they had to pay for their own travel ('ceptin the people from
developing countries) it is especially cool that most participants actually
did write their thinkpieces.  Some people even seemed to have read their
peer's work beforehand.

As a reward/relief, immediately after the workshop I got drunk and poured
myself onto a plane for 6 days of trouble in Copenhagen.  Am heading back to
Seattle and can't wait to be home . . .