Wikimania 2016 bids/Esino Lario/Location/Technical tasks

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Cute and cuddly, boys. Cute and cuddly! Skipper, Madagascar, 2005.

The technical team focuses on connectivity and electricity at Wikimania Esino Lario

• Review the technical team outputs and composition
• Biographies of the technical team

Area	Team	Outcome	Composition	Tools/references
Location	Technical team	Making sure the technical requirements are met. Technical requirements on Wikimania Handbook. Making sure the connectivity both in the venues and accommodation responds to our needs. Making sure the electricity supply is managed. Making sure the recordings and video and documentation uploads are managed Making sure the technical equipment is available and properly stored.	Technical team chair: Simone Sala Fabexplosive	Wikimania 2015 bids/Esino Lario/Location (all included) Esino Lario/Technical Esino Lario/Technical tasks

Approach

The fundamental principles by which Wikimania Esino Lario operates can be summarized in five "pillars":

1. Collaboration. The team is one team, which includes all the people involved, who are already wikimedians or not. The edit button exists also offline, and wikimedians are all the people who want to modify things to share their knowledge and to support the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content. We include all the project contributors in the organizing team, we credit work, we design a program meant for different kind of participants, we include in a transversal way the interests and needs of different people, we make sure participants are in the best conditions to obtain a visa, we select for scholarships dedicated members which need economic support to participate (through a transparent process which provides full - really full - or partial scholarships, according to the needs), and we plan an inclusive and collaborative event.
2. Scalability. We are not planning one event, we are planning a format which can be replicated in other places. We document what we are doing and how we do it, we produce guidelines for the future and to involve people who can contribute further to other events; we look for solutions which can be relevant for other contexts.
3. What already exists. Priority is given to local suppliers and to tap on existing resources. We look at previous experiences and we build on it.
4. What can last. Priority is given to invest in what lasts beyond the event. We reduce to the minimum all the expenses related to the ephemeral and we invest time, energy and budget in what is useful and relevant beyond the event.
5. Experimenting and having fun. We gather for the pleasure of it.

Guidelines Wikimania

Connectivity

Functioning wireless Internet for all attendees (2,000+) is an absolute must. Because of the diversity of computers and mobile devices used, the wireless network must not have any captive proxies, connection timeouts, network-level malware checks, or other things that limit connectivity. Ideally an open network is used, but encryption with a password is fine so long as the password is well distributed. One password per device is not acceptable.

The venue must prepare for about 1.5 devices per attendee. Every attendee will have at least one device that wants an IP and potentially two or three. With this in mind, a /23 subnet (which supports 510 devices) or even a /22 subnet (which supports 1022 devices)—instead of the usual /24 subnet for 254 devices— should be considered. Note that the bandwidth is a lesser concern compared to support for concurrent users. While wireless is very important, the venue will also need to support wired connections, especially during the Hackathon. There must be at least one RJ45 socket in each lecture hall, connected to a central network rack. Extra switches may be necessary.

Hackathon Technical Requirements

The subnet and DHCP server must have capacity for allocating 6 IPv4 (and optionally, IPv6) addresses (preferably a /29) per hacker. This would be nice, but to be realistic, two IP addresses per person present are probably sufficient.

The following ports need to be open:

• SSH (22), DNS (53 — TCP & UDP)
• HTTP (80, 8080, 8888), HTTPS (443), FTP (20, 21)
• IMAP (143, 220), IMAPS (993), POP3 (110), POP3s (995)
• SMTP (25), SSMTP (465), SIP (5060), RTP (7078 - TCP & UDP),
• XMPP/Jabber (5222), IRC (6665-9)
• Gerrit (29418)
• ICMP (ping, traceroute) should work.

Ideally, there's no restriction on outgoing connection at all, or maybe just a blacklist for Bit Torrent and other such undesirable ports. The only thing we need incoming is DNS (yes, please allow direct external DNS replies) and ICMP.

Video recording and streaming team

• Better to hire a video production company.
• If you involve volunteers, your volunteers should have no other job except video recording, and they should be trained by your planning team's technology person. Only assign the most trustworthy volunteers to this job, since it requires a substantial time commitment.
• Always make backups of your videos.
• upload the video after the conference so that posterity may enjoy the proceedings of the conference.
• After videos have been edited, it is suggested to upload them to the Internet Archive at the highest resolution you have (upload raw DV if you have it, since there's no size limit), with one video/session per item, through the S3 API or the very reliable bulk uploader. This way, videos will be converted to several formats and will be available immediately for streaming and download.
• Ogg videos in reasonable bitrates can then be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for backup and inclusion in the wikis' pages (such as session pages and schedule). To circumvent the size limit a sysadmin will be needed, see commons:Help:Server-side upload for instructions. It's way easier if you provide the videos in the correct format; by uploading them to archive.org first, you will have Ogg-formated videos at your disposal, and you will only have to send links to the sysadmin, with no need of conversion or hard disks.