I See 'Em - Four!

I spent last week working with the Fourth International Conference on Ethnomathematics (ICEm-4). My dad hosted it, and I volunteered to help out.

I was mainly involved in two things - registration and technology.

Registration

Many of the attendees were not from the US, so they could not get checks very easily to pay for the conference. This meant they had to pay cash. Paying hundreds of dollars in cash, in a foreign country, could not have been the easiest thing for them. They would have to find an ATM, hope it would work for them, and would allow them to pull out enough money to pay for their bills, then get that cash to me.

I ended up handling about $13,000 in cash, which I had to take to the bank on the last day of the conference; this was kind of a scary thing to do - I've never held that much cash.

Of course there were the glitches with registration; people wanted to stay longer than we had thought, or shorter, or came later or earlier than expected. All this affected how much money they owed. There were also name tags that went missing, receipts that were not good enough (which my dad dealt with, not me), and other requests of verification of attendance at the conference.

Most things were resolved by Wednesday, the fourth day of the conference, but Sunday and Monday were spent running around, with a piece of paper listing who owed what, and me constantly jotting down random things on my iPod touch to make sure everyone had what they were supposed to have and that everyone was kept happy.

All in all, I didn't have too many problems with the administrative side of things. Technology, on the other hand, had more glitches.

Technology

Initially, the only technology I knew I would dealing with, was setting up a Skype connection to Portugal, on the Wednesday of the conference. I had gone to the room where this was going to happen the week before, and checked the sound and projection hookup, as well as the internet hookup. It all checked out fine. I didn't expect many other tech issues, but of course, they came up.

The big tech problem of the first day, was video recording. I had agreed to record each plenary talk, which kicked off each day. On the first day, I had thought about audio (I made the speaker use a microphone, so my flip camera would pick up the sound), and found a good location for the camera. It never occurred to me though, to find a place to put the camera on. I spent an hour that morning, trying to sit as still as possible, holding my camera - my arms got very tired that morning.

I had decided to carry my computer to the conference every day, just in case someone wanted to use it. I have a mac mini, not a laptop. It's about the size and weight of a laptop, but has no screen. I was amazed at how few people (including the tech workers at the conference site) had never seen one before.

Set-up problems were relatively minor; there were a couple people who didn't seem to want my help, when they clearly needed it; people who didn't feel comfortable using a mac (completely understandable).

An odd problem that came up was from a person who was using one of those notepad computers, which have screens that can be flipped and then written on. For some reason, her screen got stuck in "writing" mode, so it was rotated by 90-degrees. Neither I nor a tech guy who was working in the facility had ever seen this problem before. In addition, the computer user was Greek, and all the instructions were in Greek. The tech guy and I looked at it and both said the obvious line, which I will not repeat here.

The biggest tech issue that came up (and is still somewhat of an issue) was that of posting power point slides and videos online.

On the first day, at the first talk, someone in the audience asked the speaker if the power point could be posted somewhere. The speaker said they had no idea how to do this. I felt like everyone then turned to look at me, like in a movie, or a dream. I said I would put power points online, if they were emailed to me.

Then the emails started coming; "I can't send the attachment, it's too big". I kind of felt that if it was too big to send to me, it would probably be too big to post online, but I did get some flash drives from people, and shrunk their slides. At the time of this writing, I've posted 27 presentations, and expect to post more.

Posting videos is tough. We live in a youtube world, where a lot of people think you can post any videos you want on youtube. Well, you can't post 2-gig videos on youtube, I'll tell you that much. I had to find a website that would host large videos, and had to do some work reducing the file size of the videos. In the end, I found a site, but have not had time to reduce the sizes of the videos.

I worked conferences for a couple summers while I was in college, and I worked this one last week. I really like working conferences - I like the cool people you meet, and the uncool people you'll never have to see again. Given the chance, I would gladly do this kind of job full-time, but we'll see what happens when I get to Edinburgh.

I'm moving tomorrow - traveling to Ghana for a week, Oxford for a week, then up to Edinburgh. My last week in Towson was spent working on ICEm-4. I can see my end in Towson, I can see my start in Edinburgh, and I can see the 2 places I'm going to be in between. I see 'em - 4.