Isaac Asimov used to say that he never looked at his audience, but he always listened to them, and the thing he always hoped to get (and sometimes actually did get) was absolute silence: no coughing or whispering (this ways before the laptop/wifi era). Then he knew he had them.

its interesting that Doug you and Jeff are all talking about this, as we at Web Essentials have been mulling this over for more than a year. And you guys are all speaking there :-)
Last year, it wasn’t possible to get wifi for the conference, which we felt was no big deal, as its rare at Aussie conferences, and we felt that having people connected could be too distracting. After being at SxSW (where for the panel I organised we used a live blog for questions) I came to feel that it is de rigeur to have wifi, but we still worried about the effect discussed by you, Jeff and Doug. This year we will be having wifi, but not in the venue. This is partly because we are using the Uni network, and they exclude lecture theatres from the wifi network (as a teacher, I found years ago network access in classrooms really distracting for students, and at times this infuriated me).

Yes, we exclude the prospect of innovative uses of the network as mentioned by you, Doug and many commenters, but I think its a compromise that might work for now.

We’ll see :-)

john

I like the idea you have proposed here Eric. It definitely makes sense. Although at SXSW, I would think the access points would be up near the stage somewhere (as the signal seemed to get weaker in hallways).