The show must go on ... the Web
JENNY SINCLAIR
Tuesday, March 13, 2001

The scene at the main auditorium of the Melbourne Convention 
Centre was somewhere between a computer swap meet and a school 
working bee; wires and laptops everywhere, volunteers in the 
seats diligently making lengths of cable, all to a soundtrack 
of unneccessarily high volume. 

The weekend's and today's meetings of the Internet Corporation 
for Assigned Names and Numbers at the convention centre are 
webcast and archived, as part of ICANN's attempts to involve 
as many people as possible. 

And to get it running, it's all hands on deck. 

Former ISOC-AU president Kate Lance, a system manager at 
Connect.com.au, was assigned the job of attaching connectors 
to the end of cables. 

"This is the first time I've made a cable," she said, but she 
seemed to be enjoying a job that she was eminently overqualified 
for. 

Meanwhile, ISOC-AU executive director Tony Hill was slotting an 
Aironet communications card into his laptop; the whole convention 
centre was being "unwired" for a 2Mb/second network, connected to 
a Telstra feed. 

A webcast that began as just one simple camera is now up to three 
cameras, an IRC channel for remote participation and Windows Media 
Player and RealPlayer audiovisual feeds. 

The whole thing is run by a core team of four technicians, with 
backup from the local volunteers. 

Team leader Ben Edelman was in the auditorium within three hours 
of getting off his flight from Boston, running on "coffee, cookies 
and an autopilot" developed over nine complex ICANN webcasts. 

His main tools are 17 networked IBM laptops and a 2Mb link to the 
Internet from Telstra. 

Between webcasts, the equipment is locked in a cabinet to which 
there are only three keys. Edelman has one and he isn't saying who 
has the others. It adds up to total control over the configuration 
of the machines, which he says is why, although the webcasts run 
on Windows, they've never had a system crash during a live feed. 

And if they did, all would not be lost - a simple phone line to 
a server in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would keep the sound running. 

Edelman's business card styles him as a technology analyst at the 
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School - 
he's also an economics student, being of the opinion that computing 
classes are for those who don't already know enough about the 
subject. 

LINKS 

* http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/melbourne/