This is part 2 in a series on posts from my experience being part of the planning team for European Guide and Scout Centre Managers Conference (ECMC) 2017.
There is a certain calmness before the storm that settles over a scout centre who is about to be visited by a large conference. The arriving of the participants goes very quickly from being a remote event to an imminent fact.
The planning team spent the first evening we all where together with unpacking in the sleeping quarters, as soon as I could I started to try to find power outlets and internet connection for the ownCloud that I had brought to the conference. Easier said then done. In my endaevours I had quite quickly found an extension cord so broken that when I tried to use it, it blow the fuses to the HQ. Apparently, the vast amounts of flies that haunts Iceland in the summer weeks every summer has a tendency to fill up power outlets with dead flies to the point of short circuit. After the cable incident was handled, it took a while to find internet. The end result was a provisional cable from the main Ethernet switch located in the hall outside the HQ hanging in the air going into our HQ. It worked.
The ownCloud server was a test, I wanted to try out to have a venue local only file share, and since there is a thing called Rasberry Pi’s these days which are both quite powerfull and very small, I figured I could bring a complete ownCloud server system in my checked in bag. This little experiment turned out to work so-so. I have now learned that there are a number of participants who go to a scout conference without a laptop. I have also learned that installing the ownCloud local client on existing laptops don’t work if the centre manager is using a computer managed by some IT department (surprisingly common). Finally, the web interface to a local IP address with a self signed certificate requires people to add a security exception in the browser, which I don’t think anyone managed.
Next time, we try a web only system with a certificate that isn’t self signed any more.
